Messiness as a virtue

1. What are some of the messes in your life and how do you try to organize them?

I have every photograph ever taken by my family in a large Rubbermaid tub.  My daughter took them home with her once.  I thought she was going to scan them and organize them virtually for me, but she ended up bringing them all back, untouched, along with a pile of empty photo albums.  It's not quite the Bettmann Archives, but it's a big enough mess that I'm not inclined to tackle it any time soon.  Every once in a while, I'll pull the tub out of the closet and look at the pictures of my kids when they were babies, and then I'll think, I really should do something about this.  Then I put it back in the closet.  Maybe the next time I retire, I'll take that on as a project.  But for now, I've made peace with the fact that it's a mess and will likely remain a mess for a while.  At least they are all collocated!

2. What are your thoughts on the work of Valdis Krebs as presented beginning on page 180? Is this something that would interest you as an information scientist?

I was intrigued by the social mapping projects that Krebs has undertaken.  Human beings and their relationships can be the messiest of all messes.  I found it interesting that the mapping uncovered relationships that did not show up on the org chart, as well as discovering relationships that only existed on the org chart.  In some ways, I believe that at times I am doing some social mapping of my own.  When I work with a library, the library implementation lead may be the person with the project title, but they may not always be the one that is truly in charge.  There may be someone else on the team that is the true leader.  It is interesting to observe the dynamics and discover who the decision maker ultimately turns out to be within the team.  In some libraries, the cataloger has a great deal of power, and in others the cataloger isn't even consulted about metadata decisions that are being made concerning data migration.  Some project leads are very good at change management, and others simply have not prepared their staff for the changes that will be wrought with the implementation.  It's interesting, but as a very task-oriented person, I'm much more intent on making sure we are all communicating clearly and getting the data migrated successfully.

3. Relate what Weinberger is saying about the definitional view and the prototype view to the information behavior models presented in this course.

I can see a relationship between the definitional view and environmental scanning.  In the definitional view, we categorize by defining.  In environmental scanning, we organize information into categories of internal and external factors and use this information in planning and decision making.  We have defined environmental sectors into which we place information for a specific purpose.  When I think about the prototype view, sense-making comes to mind, because it can be an information sharing activity.  We share our stories, and our belief systems influence what information we pass along to others.  This sharing makes our sense-making an ongoing activity, which would naturally be affected by the prototypes developed during our sharing of attitudes and thoughts during the process  of making sense.


4. What are the library prototypes? Experiment with identifying three levels of abstraction for libraries. Be sure to think about how different cultures may think about/abstract libraries.

When I think about libraries, I first think about books.  (Yes, I'm old school.)  But even the print book can be seen as a prototype for "library book."  What once was always a bound sheaf of papers might now be an image on a screen, a moving picture, or a voice reading a story.  Considering libraries, I next think about library services.  While the services might be different from one culture to another, most library users think of libraries as places that contain helpful people.  One library service prototype might be the reference desk.  We may all have a different definition of what a reference desk looks like, or what tasks are performed at the reference desk, but we all have a concept of a reference desk and know what it is when we hear the words.  We also expect to find a helpful person there.  We come to libraries for information, for helpful services, and for entertainment.  These are abstractions which may be defined differently at various libraries, in disparate cultures, but in each case, we are able to envision a prototype.