Information Losing Value

[Joe Schallan]

At 10:05 AM on 2/21/97, Nick Arnett wrote:

[snip]
>. . . information.  When time is wasted looking for valuable information
>(this is not to imply that all "looking" is wasted time), then the value of
>tools that reduce the search time increase.

By this analysis, the value of experienced, competent librarians
should have been increasing.  This obviously has not been
happening.  Librarians' salaries, low to begin with, are not
rising any faster than general rates of inflation.

This has been variously attributed to librarianship being a female
ghetto, or to the anti-intellectualism of American culture, which
equally disrespects all knowledge workers, or to the lack of a
rigorous scientific underpinning for library research and
practice.

Librarianship has responded by increasing the emphasis on
having credentials, by attempting to obtain such distinctions
as "faculty status," and by changing the names of its
professional schools to emphasize "information science."
(But the emperor still has no clothes.)

None of this appears to have worked.  Any evidence so far
that webmastering helps increase pay?

Joe



============================
Joe Schallan, MLS
Reference Librarian/Web Page Editor
Glendale (Arizona) Public Library
jschall at glenpub.lib.az.us
============================