InfoMatters

The not-so-wonderfully named School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley just announced that it has changed its name to the School of Information (www.sims.berkeley.edu/). The previous name lasted only 12 years, replacing the common School of Library and Information Science, which itself replaced School of Librarianship in 1976 (at this rate we might expect further updates on the name in 5 years). The new name mirrors the names of schools at Texas, Michigan, Washington and Florida (that last being a College of Information) and while one may view such a change as trivial, I would agrgue that this is an important signal of change in the academic study of information.

The language of information is shared across disciplines and qualifiers such as ’science’ ’studies’ or ’systems’ evoke a rational but limiting interpretation of this field’s goals and values. If you do not believe that information is a more powerful force in our lives now then ever before then you will not care for any such name change. But if you understand that this is a moment in history where a vast range of issues related to information, from its control to its provision, from its access to its pricing, from its creation to its preservation, are being shaped by us and for us through forces and mechanisms that we need to understand, then the need for schools of information is obvious.

When we changed our name I received many comments - I trust others closer to Berkeley are making their views known. But 5 years ago, the idea of their being a school of information made many uncomfortable here. No doubt the same was said of schools of communication or of education in their day, but who now thinks these labels too general to have meaning? One day, I suspect the same will be true for iSchools. Congratulations Berkeley!

After 5 years of writing a column on information architecture for BASIST I summed up my take on the field in ten simple ‘rules’ (I use the term loosely).

1. No, we never did define it to everyone’s satisfaction.
2. Communities matter more.
3. There will be something else after blogs, wikis and memes.
4. Understanding people’s needs for information is a thorny problem.
5. A profession is not defined solely by financial concerns.
6. Findability is not a sufficient basis for architecture.
7. Usability is a design value, not a field.
8. Data is stored: Information is experienced
9. Most of the world is still not able to have this experience.
10. We’re still figuring this out, so don’t stop trying to shape it.

Obviously these need to be interepreted in the context of an emerging set of concerns but here they are for the record. I had a great time with that column but it was time for fresh perspectives and I hate to write on a fixed schedule. You can access the past columns on my own publications page: www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/publications.html

With all the talk of Yahoo filtering information access, tyou might miss a European story involving holocuast denial. David Irving, a British “historian” most famous for his claims that the holocaust did not happen, has been jailed in Austria for saying as much in a speech. He subsequently claims to have changed his mind on the basis of reviewing new information but that was too late for the court. Oddly, the comments he made were in a speech years ago, and his defense is partly based on his claim that ‘history is a growing tree’ and he now knows more than he did at the time of his comments. You can find an account of this here: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4733820.stm but this will not give you the full picture. Irving’s work has been dissected by notable historians who have tended to view his scholarship as dubious (to put it mildly), and his attempt to sue others who have criticized him failed miserably in a British court a few years back. Disturbingly, the report above mentions that Irving receives 300 fan mails a week for his views, which I suppose would encourage anyone to keep talking. But this leaves us with some interesting dilemmas. Just where does freedom of expression end? And if countering an extremist view takes painstaking research, how can the information needed to gain a balanced view be more easily accessed? I suspect there will always be people who chose to hold an opinion no matter what the evidence but this story suggests that emotion drives people far more than rationality and I wonder just where we find room for that in discussions of information, reliability, and the record of human knowledge.

The Gallup group have just released a poll on blogging (poll.gallup.com/content/?ci=21397) and it is being interpreted by some as a swipe at the hype. In a survey of just over 1000 adult respondents they report that 60% of users never read a blog. This is a classic case of needing to read the full data to get at the story. A reporter from our local student paper rang me to ask if this showed that blogs were just a fad. Hum… 40% of the adults in this poll did read blogs, and we know that the biggest users are teenagers. Add to the mix the comparative recency of blogging and one might think these data make a pretty compelling case for its sustainability and long-term health.

Of course, the real story, as always with technology, is people, and homo sapiens really does like to talk and share ideas. Like everything involving our words and voices, not all of it is worth reading or hearing, but blogging gives you the chance to make that call for yourself. I suspect the bigger worry of journalists is the extent to which news and political blogs might gain credibility over established outlets. There is also very real concern these days about threats to academic peer review which should make us think of blogs less as a vehicle for spouting opinions than as one more example of communication tools by passing the established structures for sharing and informing. There is good and bad here.

The earliest web pages contained lots of pretty useless personal information and pictures of people’s pets. There are still sites like this but the medium was adapted and shaped by users into the current web that you can no longer imagine living without. Now there is still lots of garbage out there but there is also remarkable information to be had. It will be the same for blogging - the best uses are yet to be imagined.

There have been many comments about the state of LIS education but most have, in my view, centered on the wrong issues. The need is not to revamp curricular offerings to ensure there is a course on cataloging taught to everyone (it’s actually already there in most programs), or to cast the world into the stereotypical division of of people-centric libraries versus technology, but to work harder on quality control throughout the LIS education world. You can download a PDF of a paper April Norris and I wrote on this for the Journal of Education in Library and Information Science if you care to read more by clicking here: Crying Wolf

There is some confusion about job titles that always comes up around information professionals (see!). Not content with being librarians or information scientists (well, you know what they say about any discipline that has ’science’ in its name), people have reached further to become information architects, knowledge engineers, intelligence analysts, user experience designers, etc. Trouble is, these are all a bit clunky and liable to take the conversation down a path you would rather not follow. In an attempt to get us back to single word labels, the term ‘informationist’ has gained some currency. I have a difficult time swallowing this one but if it floats your boat….

Oddly, the push to one word is being confused by the co-occurence of this term in some places with Information Specialist in Context, shortened to ISIC. That an acronym which can only be pronounced “I sick” is being advocated by, of all groups, the Medical Library Association should have you checking the date — no it’s not April 1st — and it can only be a strategy to force you into accepting ‘Informationist’ as a better option. Why is life so complicated? See more at: http://www.mlanet.org/research/informationist