I was planning on responding to Kathryn’s request for discussion about the Information R/evolution movie on the Libraries Interact blog, when I realised that I wanted to say was going to be long enough for a post on its own.
For those that haven’t seen it this is the Information R/evolution movie.
There are two main ideas I had while watching the movie.
The first is that there is a challenge for all of us who think of ourselves as information professionals, and particularly those of us who are librarians. The challenge is that we need to think about digital information in new ways. We need to examine how we’re organising information and to consider if we’re trying to organise the digital information with the same assumptions and constraints that we apply to physical information.
I think this is one of the main thrusts of the Everything is Miscellaneous book by David Weinberger. A single piece of digital information has a multitude of metadata fields associated with it. We should be able to search, organise, prioritise and manage the digital information on any of these fields. Not just the select few that we’re familiar with from organising the physical world.
The second challenge is to provide our users with tools that allow them to organise the information we provide in ways that are of interest to our users. For example we should be considering giving our users the ability to:
Tag information in our system;
Give our users a mechanism to network with other users and staff;
Comment on information in our system; and
Work with our users to build systems that give them the functionality that they want, not the functionality that we think they want.
It’s going to be interesting to watch the way in which information professionals evolve and the way they interact with systems. Interesting times are in our futures, both as providers of information services, and consumers of information services.
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