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: LI Issues

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Nicola Franklin from the View from the Hill Blog has pointed me in the direction of an article by Larry Prusak in the December 2009 issue of the SLA Information Outlook entitled "You can never have too much Knowledge" In the article, which is summarised by Nicola, Larry argues that "information' is now a commodity which is cheap and easy to find/sell/buy and that therefore information professionals who stick to a gatekeeping role of finding information for users are unlikely to be in demand for long"

I'm not an SLA member so unfortunately I cant read the full article, but Nicola raises an interesting issue in her blog post:

"Are librarians (information professionals, knowledge managers, records managers... etc!) up to the challenge of rising above 'information commoditisation' and able to prove their worth to their users and society?"

My immediate answer to this would be yes...I hope so! But what are we actually talking about here, are we saying that information professionals who have been involved with enquiry work are likely to become obsolete? I cant see this ever happening.

Certainly information has become easier to find, you just have to ask people what their favourite search engine is to understand this, but there are inherent risks with individuals looking for and finding information in this manner. I do agree that there has been a subtle shift in how information is delivered. I would argue that with Web 2.0 tools the focus for Information Professionals has shifted from creating content, to enabling and facilitating the creation of this content and as Nicola says providing "...independant voices to provide validation of trustworthy information sources" what do you think?

Full post as published by LI Issues on January 12, 2010 (boomark / email).