Kuhlthau et al. studied the ISP model in terms of the needs and practices of lawyers. This was one of my least favorite papers by Kuhlathau. Not only was her research pool limited to eight lawyers, but the whole article was basically a rehash of "The Role of Experience."
Kuhlthau found "that experience was the only individual characteristic to influence an analyst’s effectiveness in his or her work" (Kuhlthau 2001, pg. 4). Here Kuhlthau is quoting her paper "The Role of Experience" - In that she discusses how workers can be groups into two levels, expert and novice, and how these two groups respond to complexity and uncertainty differently. Even there goals were different: "As a novice, his emphasis was on getting the 'right' conclusion. As an expert, he emphasized interpreting and constructing for the purpose of ‘adding value to the client’s knowledge" (Kulhthau 2001, pg. 4). I found it interesting how the concept of information changes as a worker, or lawyer, here, gains new experience and knowledge. Information goes from being a simple right or wrong fact, to a
Like the doctors and nurses who I read about for my group's presentation, lawyers seem to come to librarians for help only a limited degree; when they did rely on a librarian, it was to locate a particular piece of material (Kuhlthau 2001, pg. 15). There is a disconnect between professionals and librarians, as we've seen again and again with each presentation.
More interesting than Kuhlthau's rehash was Dilevko's "My Mother Can't Quite Understand Why I Decided to go to Library School." Unlike Kuhlthau's article on lawyers and the other papers we read on professionals, Dilevko's paper dealt with the failure of librarians to communicate with their patrons, rather than the other way around. While I found this article engaging, not only because it covered a new topic but also because the writing style reminded me more of a humanities paper than a science one, the results found by Dilveko's paid proxies were disappointing. As I mentioned, the other articles focused on librarian's lamentations that professionals did not take advantage of a library's myriad learning opportunities. here, however, we have evidence as to why they do not: librarians don't provide any help. Of the 488 questions, complete answers were provided less than 30% of the time (Dilevko 2000, pg. 302).
To connect this to Kulhthau, it is possible to look at the librarians who didn't pursue the questions as novices. That is, perhaps the librarians saw the proxies; questions as have a right or wrong answer, and it wasn't worth attempting to delve deeper. Librarians who followed up or who check multiple sources for the patrons might be considered experts: information was retrieved that was hoped would enhance the proxies' learning experience.
ASKs can be complicated, and it's possible that some librarians don't want to put in the time or effort into discovering the patron's (or proxy) specific problem, goal, or intention. As Taylor discussed in "Question Negotiation," a patron's true need sometimes needs to be coaxed out; question negation is key to a successful relationship between librarian and patron. This can be exhausting, especially when a librarian has responsibilities over a number of other tasks. Dilveko's proxies did complain that the librarians didn't seem to be busy, but it's possible that they simply didn't understand the other tasks that the librarians' had. However, librarians should be aware that they are failing patrons and that with cutbacks and dwindling support, they can't afford to alienate potential users.
To move away from the week's readings, I was intrigued by the group presentation on law. Erin and Marissa's portions of the project were particularly interesting. I hadn't considered the ways that people use the library to interact with or learn about our government and laws. As we move toward more digital and electronic resources, we run the risk of leaving behind large portions of the population; not everyone can afford a computer or a reliable Internet connection. I support eGovernment - I approve of the attempts to make the government more transparent - but replacing live help with machines can also cause problems. As Erin mentioned, not only is the American population serevely uneducated about the workings of our government, those who are information poor will not take advantage of the wealth of information online due to their distrust not only in the government, but of the Internet itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment