librarian, library schools, lack of math skills

[Pat Anderson]

>     I admit; I'm from a "library school" (lots of potential there for
>human interaction studies), so you can regard this reply as biased if you
>want.  Does everyone think that such studies of man-machine interaction
>should be "flowing out of schools of library science."  I grant that it

Personally, I think a lot of interface and interaction information has
*already* come from the library side of things, but people don't
necessarily perceive it as such. Think of classes which teach how
to handle a reference interview? Or bibliographic instruction
courses based around models of effective information searching
skills. Marcia Bates, who Melissa Silvestre mentioned a few days
ago, is indeed one of the leaders in this area.

Before artificial intelligence became passe', I devoted half of an
article in LISR to discussions of research domains in the artificial
intelligence field for which the library research holds undiscovered
treasures. My favorite examples were some of the research efforts
by the AI researchers to figure out how people seek information and
how to find out what they really want to know when they ask a question.
It took the AI community several years to discover that people don't
always ask questions which define their real information need! *Any*
reference librarian of the past hundred years or more could have
told them that.

Many of the common issues I found between the AI community
and the library community then still hold true in the newer
information provision environment of the Web. The library
community has a great deal of experience and expertise
in the areas of organizing, retrieving, searching information,
*and* in the information search  and question negotiation
processes between information providers and seekers.

Our biggest problem is not in the lack of knowledge, but in
how to communicate it. What we really need are cross-disciplinary
librarians, persons who have enough traditional library experience
and training to be well grounded in the areas mentioned above,
and enough technical insight and expertise to be able to communicate
this effectively to the computer support persons doing most of the
actual development.

We should contribute to the web the skills for which librarians
have always been recognized --

organization
        why not have a web interface organized by some
        of the BI paradigms for good information seeking skills, say
        "start broad, get narrow," (encyclopedias, textbooks,
        monographs, research articles, tech reports) or publication
        process (tech reports, journal articles, monographs, textbooks,
        encyclopedias)

evaluation
        Evaluative indexing and abstraction of resources. Annotated
        bibliographies. *Collection development*. Hey, folks, how else
        would you describe Vannevar Bush's "trailblazer" concept?
        The first time I read that, I said to myself, "I can do this."
         (If you haven't read this article yet, it is available at URL:

        http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/~dduchier/misc/
        vbush/as-we-may-think.html

information seeking *and* teaching info search skills
        I figure consulting librarians will use the web as well
        as print information sources and databases for their
        clients, as will/do reference librarians for theirs.
        And many libraries are already *teaching* internet
        navigation. I would like to see it taught within the
        framework of all information resources.

Well, that's one of my favorite soapboxes. Sorry to be so longwinded.
For interested parties, the article to which I referred is:

"Expert systems, expertise, and the library and information
professions." LISR 10, 367-388 (1988).


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