January 2003

There\’s a discussion going on at LIBREF-L about a reference department thinking about changing its name to something including the word \”information\”. In one of the replies, Victor Lieberman of the University of North Dakota made a statement that I instantly fell in love with:

Think of somebody staring out at the night sky. A computer says that you have gazillions of pieces of information at your fingertips, all the stars in the heaven are there for you to see, nothing hidden. A librarian will be willing to point out to you that those particular stars, over there, are the big dipper.

That, I believe, in a nutshell, is the difference between \”information\” and \”knowledge.\”

To me, this speaks to the core of librarianship, and many of our current issues can be traced back to this concept. Why do we need more libraries, with more books, rather than just letting everyone do their own Internet searching? Because libraries are staffed by people with knowledge, people who know how to sift through the data and come up with value. Why do librarians need Master\’s degrees? Because surviving the rigors of a graduate program, regardless of what is taught, proves that a librarian has the skills necessary to find and organize information and synthesize knowledge. Why should a librarian be paid at an equal level with other professionals? Because, like engineers, we can take raw information and make it meaningful, manipulating it in unique ways and producing not just a collection of data, but something entirely new.

Read Victor\’s whole post.

FastTracker pointed out this little blurb over at Forbes

\”Some People Just Have Too Much Time


On its kids-oriented Barbie Web site, Mattel posted a tongue-in-cheek poll about careers for the 43-year-old, 1-billion-copy teenager doll. Adults took this seriously. Librarians, for example, put messages on Internet trade message boards urging colleagues to vote for their profession over, say, architect or cop.\”

Good News From The Daily Evergreen where they say In an age where people consider the Internet to be replacing libraries as a functional means of research, some students are not willing to rule out fact-finding that many would consider more tedious.

\”As slow as it may seem, the library gives you a very broad array of information to choose from,” said Jacob Schwecke, a sophomore wildlife ecology major. “And it is easy to use as long as you learn how to refine your search.\”

steven bell writes \”This Washington Post article will be of interest to those who follow the history and future development of the WWW. It details Tim Berners\’Lee\’s WWW report to the NSF on January 27, 2003. In addition to providing information on Lee\’s work on the semantic web, the author makes some interesting comparisons between Lee\’s work on the web and Tolkien\’s Lord of the Rings\’ fantasy world.\”

Business 2.0 has A Story on the world of \”category management,\” a bizarre and controversial place in which the nation\’s biggest boook retailers ask one supplier in a category to figure out how best to stock their shelves.

They say category management is now standard practice at nearly every U.S. supermarket, convenience store, mass merchant, and drug chain. And its use is growing because it works — at least from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. According to a recent survey by retail consultancy Cannondale Associates, retailers attribute 14 percent sales growth to category management; manufacturers report an 8 percent jump. Both say such collaboration is the key to maximum efficiency.

Thoughts on applying this to libraries?

One From Florida, where they say As the number of middle school students in South Florida has boomed, school libraries have struggled to keep pace with children\’s need for reading materials.


Now middle schools are being told by a regional accrediting organization to increase their number of books by as much as 50 percent — at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars during lean budget times.


While some of the money would be used for popular novels, schools would also buy multicultural texts, books that support the high-stakes FCAT exam and resources that supplement textbook materials.

\”If we\’re not careful, we\’ll have a whole generation of people who want the quick snapshot of what happened and won\’t take the time to see the whole picture,\”

The Philadelphia Enquirer has This Story on five librarians visiting South Jersey from Russia.

Spending a week living with people whom they sometimes struggled to communicate with, people who may be unfamiliar with their culture, was an eye-opener for the group. The Russian librarians were especially interested in finding funding to help young adults connect to libraries creatively.

\”America is so diverse,\” she said. \”People here are so tolerant, trying to understand other cultures. This is not the same in Russia.\”

\”Jeb\” passed along Word From Florida that Middle school teachers in Escambia County will no longer be allowed to incorporate \”The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn\” into their classes.


School officials said one parent of a seventh-grader complained about the usage of Mark Twain\’s 19th-century novel, which chronicles the adventures of a white boy and a runaway slave and uses racial references more than 200 times.

More Here as well.

Jen Young sent over This NYTimes Story on a rather unusual design by Enríque Norten/TEN Arquitectos for the proposed Brooklyn Library for the Visual and Performing Arts.

Sleek, curvaceous, colorful and alive, this is New York\’s first full-fledged masterwork for the information age. More than any other recent New York project, Norten\’s design captures the spirit of the contemporary city.

There\’s more Here

The NYTimes follows up on This One. They say newspapers and political organizations are engaged in technological one-upmanship over \”AstroTurf\” — letters to the editor that look like authentic grass-roots responses from readers but are not.

It turns out that one was from gopteamleader.com. Here\’s The Full Story.

\”They had no idea that they were bending any sort of rules whatsoever or that they were trying to put one over on us,\” Ms. Clotfelter said. \”I e-mailed back and forth with one woman who was distressed that we wouldn\’t print her letter because it was really how she felt.\”