There and Back Again...

There's more than you could ever want to know at home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/sabb/

I did a lot of things and went a lot of places in the months I was gone. Some of them had to do directly with library issues, but most were at least mixed with other bits of my various agendas, and very few were entirely within library walls. For me, that's an obvious point: I'm most concerned with issues and activities that link outwards from the traditional interests of librarians. I'm an anthropologist who happens to be a librarian, not the other way around, and the library happens to be my primary roost, but doesn't define what I do or where my long-run interests lie.

I was looking for people who are linking libraries with classrooms and collaborating with others to build the infrastructure for distributed information management systems. I found very few librarians and not many IT people who are thinking along those lines, despite what I found in hortatory writings on the future of Information. Some of what seem to me the most important observations came about via reading, rather than through observation or conversations. I read a broad range of stuff on Information Futures, much of it in the context of thinking about the needs and unique features of education in the liberal arts. Here are a few of the real gems:

What is happening is less a shift in learning and education than in communication and in the sharing, manipulation, and dissemination of information. (Williamson 80, in Hawkins & Battin The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century)

In a post-Web world, campuses must begin to create distributed virtual environments that mediate the quality of academic information resources and foster high levels of interaction among those who use them... track, test, and implement new technologies for searching, browsing, and filtering network-based academic information resources. New technologies will make it possible to render information in new visual forms, creating meaningful groupings and clusters of information. Such technologies will go far toward making distributed virtual environments for teachers and learners a reality. (Katz 176-177 in Hawkins & Battin)

Librarians will... evolve from collection builders to knowledge prospectors... evolve from classifiers, catalogers and indexers to metadata developers and publishers ...evolve from information retrieval specialists to knowledge navigators and 'expedition guides' ...from reference librarians to information analysts/knowledge interpreters ...need to become effective collaborators as well as teachers... (Griffiths 237-240, passim, in Hawkins & Battin)

Take the initiative...Don't wait to be asked to participate with faculty... Work with systems designers to improve functionality and make information easy to find. Stop complaining and start talking constructively with system designers. Learn from digital library research. Do not assume that its limited perspective means that its findings are invalid. Take a risk: meet and respond to the changing information environment and commit to improvement. Explore, discover and create new services; give up some control of the known... (McMillan "The Digital Library: without a soul can it be a library?" [http://acadprojwww.wlu.edu/vol4/BlackmerH/public_html/mypdfs/withoutasoul.pdf])

• ubiquitous computing changes pretty much everything in education, in teaching and learning, for pretty much every consituency

• it's just not very interesting to think about libraries as separate entities --it's their interconnections with other constituencies that are the interesting frontiers

• librarians can and should be active participants in developing applications for use in teaching and learning

• it's necessary to find the means to institutionalize paying more attention to the leading edges of digital technologies

• we need to figure out how to make better use of what we have, at the same time being mindful of what's just over the horizon

• these are communications technologies, and efforts to make more, better, and more creative and accumulative use of communication possibilities ought to be better supported ...

A lot of my energies went into looking into Digital Library issues of various sorts, GIS and Information Commons being two of the most time-intensive.

I see some interesting pathways for GIS, which I'm exploring via R.E. Lee and NSDL proposals and involvement with ACS in the Digital South project.

The Information Commons issues are more tangled, and more tied up in what seem to be institutional immobilities. At its best an IC is an environment in which students, faculty, and staff can find support for the full spectrum of their uses of Information: equipment to handle problems that arise with all information media, consultants to assist with reference, with software, with statistical problems, with hardware, with integration of the full range of media. Wellesley and Mount Holyoke come closest to providing this environment for the communities they support. Both devote much more staff to such support than we do, and both involve students in such support more than we do.