A modern librarian’s graduate degree generally includes the words “Information Science.” Librarians are trained to have a solid understanding of “information”—how it is created, whether or not the creators are reliable, what formats are appropriate to the subject field, how information is organized, its ‘shelf life’, where information can be located, and the means by which it can be disseminated. Traditionally libraries have been charged with the collection, organization, preservation and transmission of information by means dictated by the end user. Librarians are taught to critically evaluate information; they develop evaluation criteria like objectivity, currency, accuracy, and authoritativeness.
Paradoxically, with the exception of subject specialists in academic and research libraries, librarians don’t need to understand informational content in any depth. They just need to know how to get at it. My experiences in public libraries have sent me searching for the chemical components of a class of drugs, the chief elements of Italianate landscaping, the name of the organization that houses the Campbell Collection and all the Rose Bowl winning teams since 1902… The hunting has been great fun!
Today, the hunt is far more democratic yet unexpectedly more difficult and, potentially, more dangerous. The universality of Internet connectedness, coupled with a cyber-glut of information, blurs distinctions within the Information Hierarchy. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish—data, information, knowledge, opinion, belief; all are equivalent. Understanding is social consensus; Wisdom whatever is currently trending. While the e-verse drowns in data, librarians struggle to keep it reliable.
Is that reliability valued today? Everyone can and does “Google” for answers to diverse questions. Information is quickly “Binged” to mobile devises and “Twitted” in a frenzy of egalitarianism. Knowledge has become the creature of a social moment; information a commodity driven by expediency, bottom lines, and ‘push.’ Certainly today’s intellectual junk food has its place. If you are hungry and looking for a Chinese restaurant in a strange city, texting GOOGLE® for the location of the nearest one is far better than researching the history of Asian cuisine and customs! People want their information to be easy, hip, and quick. Any results that satisfy those criteria are “good enough,” no need to go further.
Good Enough information works in the short run, but it is not knowledge. Critical judgment is short circuited by ever shrinking attention spans. Context is lost in expediency. Consensus may be fine for trivial and transitory situations, but a steady diet of factoid tidbits can lead to poor intellectual nutrition. One’s sense of a well-balanced diet of facts and principles degrades when the mind is put on the back burner of opinion too often. Expediency blunts the appetite for better fare. One forgets how to plan, prepare, and serve a fine meal.
Formerly information was defined as knowledge attained through study or communication by authoritative persons; today it consists of topical facts or data supplied by any agent. A knowledgeable person was thoroughly conversant with a subject, having gathered diverse, complementary, and supplementary information into a corpus of facts; today, knowledge is downgraded to a general awareness of ideas or principles. Understanding required skilled discernment and comprehension; Encarta defines it as “somebody’s interpretation of something or a belief or opinion based on an interpretation or inference of something.” As for wisdom, we won’t go there.
As a librarian and a traditionalist I find today’s ubiquitous buffet of information without context or depth to be troubling. Today’s typical information seeker knows everything and understands nothing. We live in an age where access to data is incredibly lavish. This is good. Unfortunately plenty has made the mind careless, or should I say, care less. The fundamental substructures of knowledge are crumbling. The recipe for True Understanding must be preserved. I fear tomorrow may have no room or regard for the cordon bleu.
Data is the roux of our chef d’oeuvre. It must be intelligently organized and carefully tended before it becomes Information. Before qualifying as knowledge, Information must be seasoned with similar and contradictory facts. Related sources must be checked. Confirmation of the truth or correctness of data must be determined; critical judgment utilized to strain away impurities. Thus clarified, Knowledge becomes the principal ingredient of our entrée. Refinement follows. The pièce de résistance, Understanding, comes from years of hard work, practice, and devotion to excellence. The Wise cook knows how to tailor the menu for the user, what to take away and how to garnish the presentation.
It takes work and time. Fewer and fewer are willing to develop the recipe of True Understanding. Vive le connoisseur.
Showing posts with label Information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Information. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2011
Monday, June 23, 2008
The Persistence of Error
The other day the old French round, French Cathedrals, was stuck in my head, the victim of some benign cognitive itch. There is a term for songs that you can’t get out of your mind; songs you mentally sing all day. The word is earworm, from the German Ohrwurm. Knowing the word is not the point however.
What I found when I searched the Internet for the few words I couldn’t recall was all too common—a variety of cathedral names, either incorrect or spelled “creatively.” In this particular instance Beaugency and the words after Notre Dame were up for grabs. [Incidentally my spell checker does not like the word Beaugency. It has offered the word “biogenic” as a replacement. Ah, but spell check’s a whole blog entry of its own.]
As a professional librarian I try to avoid giving any information source from wikipedia. Wikis are fun and can be a place to jump off when all else fails, but wikis are risky. Whether the errors come from a deliberate attempt to mislead or from an over-willing spirit, once the error appears, it persists in the electronic ether a very long time. Librarians like to find the most authoritative source possible. By authoritative we mean an expert source. If the only result GOOGLE can give is a wiki answer, the librarian needs to try a different approach—maybe a book. Of course there is also the possibility—fortunately very rare—that there is no answer. Yes, sometimes the answer does not exist. Making one up is not ethical.
Books can contain errors too. It’s a good idea to look at more than one source. Occasionally an authoritative source, for example, a journal article, may contain mistakes. I often suspect some of these errors are deliberate so those who plagiarize can be identified. Others may be typos, but these types of errors generally do not affect the correctness of the information in a reputable source.
Yes, people make innocent spelling errors. My Misspeller’s Dictionary has been heavily thumbed. Spelling may soon become an endangered skill. Instant messengers have a lexicon no dictionary could wish to include. But the problem is much deeper than shortcuts, spelling errors and typos. It goes way beyond “wikiinfo.” The ease and anonymity of Internet information creation fosters a culture of those who don’t really care about accuracy or truth. Contributor e-prints are raisons d’être. Information is egalitarian in its inception. Its creation is a World Wide Web right. Content, and more importantly, context, is not particularly important. After all, information begins with an “I.”
Equally important to the perpetuation of mistakes in today’s asynchronous and instantaneous media is the lack of critical evaluation. People are only too willing to believe what they read on the Internet, or hear around the water cooler for that matter. Evaluation is a skill that must be nutured. Questions must be asked. The information seeker needs to ask about the credentials of the source. Does this information jibe with what is already known? Is there some sort of “agenda” behind the information? Is the information seeker relying too much on a social consensus? How important is truth?
The persistence of misinformation is insidious. The lack of intellectual rigor will undermine the corpus of knowledge that has been painstakingly created over centuries. Mistakes are self perpetuating. Fundamental elements of knowledge that are built on the shifting sands of social affirmation will collapse eventually. I worry that those who will need to reconstruct reliable information, those who will need to organize that information into knowledge, will no longer have the intellectual tools necessary for the job.
If this happens, then the irony of the situation derives from the inception of the Internet itself. Back in the late 1960s, universities, government entities, and the defense establishment created a network through which accurate and timely information could be shared. The many “creative” versions of French cathedrals was not what they intended.
What I found when I searched the Internet for the few words I couldn’t recall was all too common—a variety of cathedral names, either incorrect or spelled “creatively.” In this particular instance Beaugency and the words after Notre Dame were up for grabs. [Incidentally my spell checker does not like the word Beaugency. It has offered the word “biogenic” as a replacement. Ah, but spell check’s a whole blog entry of its own.]
As a professional librarian I try to avoid giving any information source from wikipedia. Wikis are fun and can be a place to jump off when all else fails, but wikis are risky. Whether the errors come from a deliberate attempt to mislead or from an over-willing spirit, once the error appears, it persists in the electronic ether a very long time. Librarians like to find the most authoritative source possible. By authoritative we mean an expert source. If the only result GOOGLE can give is a wiki answer, the librarian needs to try a different approach—maybe a book. Of course there is also the possibility—fortunately very rare—that there is no answer. Yes, sometimes the answer does not exist. Making one up is not ethical.
Books can contain errors too. It’s a good idea to look at more than one source. Occasionally an authoritative source, for example, a journal article, may contain mistakes. I often suspect some of these errors are deliberate so those who plagiarize can be identified. Others may be typos, but these types of errors generally do not affect the correctness of the information in a reputable source.
Yes, people make innocent spelling errors. My Misspeller’s Dictionary has been heavily thumbed. Spelling may soon become an endangered skill. Instant messengers have a lexicon no dictionary could wish to include. But the problem is much deeper than shortcuts, spelling errors and typos. It goes way beyond “wikiinfo.” The ease and anonymity of Internet information creation fosters a culture of those who don’t really care about accuracy or truth. Contributor e-prints are raisons d’être. Information is egalitarian in its inception. Its creation is a World Wide Web right. Content, and more importantly, context, is not particularly important. After all, information begins with an “I.”
Equally important to the perpetuation of mistakes in today’s asynchronous and instantaneous media is the lack of critical evaluation. People are only too willing to believe what they read on the Internet, or hear around the water cooler for that matter. Evaluation is a skill that must be nutured. Questions must be asked. The information seeker needs to ask about the credentials of the source. Does this information jibe with what is already known? Is there some sort of “agenda” behind the information? Is the information seeker relying too much on a social consensus? How important is truth?
The persistence of misinformation is insidious. The lack of intellectual rigor will undermine the corpus of knowledge that has been painstakingly created over centuries. Mistakes are self perpetuating. Fundamental elements of knowledge that are built on the shifting sands of social affirmation will collapse eventually. I worry that those who will need to reconstruct reliable information, those who will need to organize that information into knowledge, will no longer have the intellectual tools necessary for the job.
If this happens, then the irony of the situation derives from the inception of the Internet itself. Back in the late 1960s, universities, government entities, and the defense establishment created a network through which accurate and timely information could be shared. The many “creative” versions of French cathedrals was not what they intended.
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