“We’re the original search engines and we help people find things to make their lives better,” she said of librarians.
Carla Hayden the new Librarian of Congress is interviewed here and describes the role of librarians in the future. Since my daughter and her husband hold masters degrees in Information Sciences, my attention is often drawn to the role of the librarian. Both daughter and son in law work at Allrecipes.com as taxonomists, taking the dewey decimal system to a new level.
Maybe one would also call them professional curators of food data? One can imagine that they might be creating connectionist learning for their “clients”…
You know, it would be great to do a PSA interview with them sometime!! Probably a long distance one via Skype, but that could still be very good. Let’s remember to try to plan that into our upcoming fall schedule. Below are my non expert rumination, that perhaps our experts could elaborate on or correct for us.
Recipes are a good metaphor for learning…a set of instructions that helps us accomplish something…If we do these learning activities step by step, we’ll end up with a tasty dish of skills and capabilities…perhaps. And then there’s “cooking together”…or collaborative learning, if you will.
Taxonomists do a certain kind of pattern recognition that is a subset of the larger activity of curation… What do these things have in common, how can we categorize them?
In the Library, the card file contains references and correlations, but in the cloud a “library” is a web of references too complex to standardize according to a category system like Dewey. Instead, we have search, which makes connections on the fly, and which we need to actively follow to find out where “we can go with this”.
In other words, the information chunk isn’t found in a categorical filing system, but by making real time correlations using a search engine. Or by doing a Boolean search. Or by asking Siri, our friendly reference librarian in our pocket.
In a database, there are multiple correlations, and one can change them on the fly in real time, and discover meaning in connections that no one may have noticed before, or that might not mean anything at all to some people, and everything to others.