http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib143.html

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians

#143, June 14, 2002

Or why you might want to hire me for speaking engagements or workshops. To see outlines for previous presentations I've done, click on Handouts

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Order My Book

Click HEREto place a direct order for my book, The Quintessential Searcher: the Wit and Wisdom of Barbara Quint

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What IS Ex Libris?

http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/purpose.html

The purpose and intended scope of this e-zine

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Highlights from Previous Issues:


My Rules of Information

  1. Go where it is
  2. The answer depends on the question
  3. Research is a multi-stage process
  4. Ask a Librarian
  5. Information is meaningless until queried by human intelligence
  6. Information can be true and still wrong

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Guru Interviews

  1. Tara Calishain
  2. Jenny Levine, part I
  3. Jenny Levine, Part II
  4. Reva Basch
  5. Sue Feldman
  6. Jessamyn West
  7. Debbie Abilock
  8. Kathy Schrock
  9. Greg Notess
  10. William Hann
  11. Chris Sherman
  12. Gary Price
  13. Barbara Quint
  14. Rory Litwin
  15. John Guscott
  16. Brian Smith
  17. Darlene Fichter
  18. Brenda Bailey-Hainer

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Cool Quotes

The collected quotes from all previous issues are at http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/cool.html

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When and How To Search the Net

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Wanna See Your Name in Lights?

Or at least on this page, anyway? I'd like to print here your contributions as well as mine. As you've noticed, articles are brief, somewhere between 200 and 500 words -- something to jog people's minds and get their own good ideas flowing. I'd also be happy to run other people's contributions to the regular features like Favorite Sites on _____. I'll pay you the same rate I pay me: nothing.

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Drop me a Line

Want to comment, ask questions, submit articles, or invite me to speak or do some training? Contact me at: marylaine at netexpress.net




Visit My Other Sites


BookBytes

http://marylaine.com/
bookbyte/index.html
My page on all things book-related. NEW STUFF ADDED in August

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Best Information on the Net

http://library.sau.edu/
bestinfo/The directory I built for O'Keefe Library, St. Ambrose University, still my favorite pit stop on the information highway.

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My Word's Worth

http://marylaine.com/
myword/index.html
a weekly column on books, words, libraries, American culture, and whatever happens to interest me.

Subject Index to My Word's Worth at
http://marylaine.com/
myword/subindex.html

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Book Proposal

Land of Why Not: an Appreciation of America. Proposal for an anthology of some of my best writing. An outline and sample columns are available here.

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My personal page

http://marylaine.com/
personal.html



SUBJECT INDEX to Past Issues

http://marylaine.com/
exlibris/archive.html

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Neat New Stuff I Found This Week
June 14: food safety, PDA support, summer reading, and more.

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My resume

http://marylaine.com/
resume.html


WHO YOU KNOW STILL COUNTS

by Marylaine Block

I've been reading a couple of books which I may tell you more about in subsequent issues,* and though one is about information entrepreneurship and the other about organizational culture, each of them makes the point that the internet and full-text databases have not changed a fundamental human instinct: when we need information, we ask somebody we trust. Indeed, in one study, people were five times more likely to approach friends or colleagues for information than to use a database or library.

That rings true to me. After all, before we were talking about the "invisible web," we were talking about the "invisible college," the network of scholars and researchers who shared what they were discovering through e-mail and conferences and preprints long before it ever made it into the formal literature.

It also squares with a rather astounding bit of data from the "How Much Information?" project at Berkeley
[http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/
how-much-info/charts/charts.html]. The authors calculate that, of all the information produced in 1999, the largest single form it reposed in -- 10 times as much as in books, 8 times as much as in newspapers or magazines -- was Office documents. Which means that most of the knowledge created each year is not publicly available, but is locked inside people's heads and hard drives.

Can that possibly be right? Test the truth of it yourself. Compare the amount of information you have posted on your web site with the amount in all the documents sitting on your own hard drive -- personnel evaluations, emergency plans, notes for a presentation on biology literature, job descriptions, budget requests -- multiplied by the number of people on your staff who also have vast private repositories on their hard drives. The amount of public information doesn't even come close, does it?

What does that mean for librarians? Well, for one thing, it suggests we should keep our subscriptions to The Encyclopedia of Associations current; it's still a great source to direct you to experts and their privately gathered and privately held knowledge.

It also suggests the vital importance of our mental or physical files of contact people and local experts (one of those books mentioned that when executives were asked what they would rescue from a burning office, virtually all of them said they'd grab their rolodexes first). We all have such files of experts; my question is whether we consolidate them with those of our colleagues and keep that composite file available on the reference desk.

It suggests that when we construct topical pages for our web site, with key resources for accounting and social work and such, we should make sure that we include networks for sharing personal knowledge in those subject areas: association web sites, listservs, usenet groups, and bulletin boards.

It may even suggest that we should emphasize the human connection side of what we do. We might let a little personality leak through on our web sites, even create quirky individual personas, instant messenger-like screen names, for librarians staffing the virtual reference desks, like Amanda Credaro's Biblia, the Warrior Librarian, http://www.warriorlibrarian.com/, for instance.

We might even bring our library staff out of the shadows or professional anonymity and introduce them on our web pages and library newsletters as living breathing people with specific educational backgrounds and hobbies and special knowledge areas. Kids might look at us quite differently if they knew we were fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or that we, say, signed our e-mails with a rock music quote of the week.

It may well be that our users who are flocking to the net instead of to the library are not exhibiting a new behavior at all; it's just that the technology has made it a little easier for them to ask somebody, or to find somebody to ask.

We may need to make it a little easier for them to find, and trust, us when they go hunting.

* Suzanne Sabrowski. Super Searchers Make It on Their Own; Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak. In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work.

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NOTE: Having just returned from my son's wedding, I've written a new My Word's Worth column about thoughts precipitated by the wedding vows he and his bride wrote for themselves. If you're interested, it's at http://marylaine.com/myword/vows.html.

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COOL QUOTE

The computer is one of the most powerful world-view-influencers. While we are working on it, it works on us, chipping here, smoothing there, molding our expansive minds to fit its powerful but much narrower capabilities. Because its operation is based solely on the highly abstract thinking process called logic, it amplifies this one aspect of our cognition. But it does this at the expense of other ways of thinking and knowing, such as intuition, physical contact, and the entire gamut of emotional and spiritual experience.

Lowell Monke. "The Web and the Plow." On his web site, Confronting Technology, http://www.gemair.com/~lmonke/

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You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2002.

[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]