Week 7 Reading Response

Three of this week's readings, "Teaching at the Desk," "Towards a User-Centered Information Service," and "Mom and Me" focus on how libraries should serve their users. Specifically, libraries should look at how the user views the world and conducts searches, and center their service strategies around these ideas. I found a couple of points in these articles noteworthy. "Teaching at the Desk" emphasizes that librarians need to shift the way they think about their roles: "As librarians, we are taught that our job is to answer questions. We must unlearn that definition of our job in order to teach at the reference desk." (459). What I think the author Elmborg is saying is that librarians should think of their role as that of assisting patrons in getting connected to the information resources they want. This ultimately means the user finds their own answer, with the librarian's help. I think this is a more effective way of providing library services, because what a librarian might think is a "good" or "correct" answer may not be satisfactory to the user asking the question.

The article "Mom and Me" by Wayne Wiegand also makes this point from a slightly different angle. The highly confusing sentence, "different people use different information differently to make sense of their worlds" is actually highly important for librarians to understand and put into practice. As Wiegand explains in his article, what one person values as an important source of information, as a librarian values books, another person may consider relatively unimportant compared to word-of-mouth information from family and friends. Librarians need to set aside their own assumptions of worth and consider how they can best assist a patron using the patron's valued information sources.

The final article "Museums, Management, Media and Memory: Lessons from the Enola Gay Exhibit" by Elizabeth Yakel stood out from the rest. It describes the controversial exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of the plane that dropped atomic bombs on Japan and information surrounding that event. I could expound on several parts of this article that interested me, but I particularly like the part about how museums have transitioned from only portraying one "accepted truth" in an exhibit to exploring different opinions and sides of an issue. I think this relates to libraries specifically in that libraries used to try to influence their patrons' reading habits by acquiring materials that they considered good or moral. Today, however, libraries are moving towards greater inclusiveness of materials by purchasing books that represent a variety of viewpoints, even those that the librarians themselves might strongly disagree with. I think this is a vital phenomenon in that it supports individuals' freedoms and rights to access of information.

Week 6 Reading Response

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Overall I found David Weinberger's book to be readable and thought-provoking. While it often came off as repetitive, I liked his overall assessment of the internet and its affect on how we organize and use knowledge. I think one of the main reasons I enjoyed this reading so much was that it spelled out the details of the internet age and its effects on knowledge so clearly. At 21, the internet is so ubiquitous in my life, and always has been, that its hard for me to comprehend what a drastic change its been from the past. Its almost the same as how you can't write about history when you're living in it... you need distance to see the connections. I feel like Weinberger helped to give me that distance so that I'm now in a better position to analyze the how the internet has changed how we organize and find information.

While reading, I marked a couple passages in the book that I found compelling and worth more thought. In one of these sections, Weinberger discusses knowledge, saying that in the past there could "be only one knowledge because the world is one way and not any other. But there will always be multiple conversations and thus multiple understandings." (203-204). This resonated with me because I agree that knowledge is not composed of single, static truths; rather it is changeable and understood uniquely in different times by different people. To assume that knowledge is unchangeable hurts both you and the people you interact with. A person who rejects the idea that knowledge is fluid and active won't be able to look at the world in new and valuable ways. Similarly, they will reject people who's conception of knowledge is different from their own. I believe everyone would benefit from conceiving of knowledge the way David Weinberger does, as a means of gaining understanding of the world and the people who occupy it, rather than a set of strict facts and definitions.

Week 5 Reading Response

I found this week's readings particularly fascinating. There seemed to be two different issues at play in the articles assigned: that of the right of individuals to the privacy of their personal information, and that of the right of individuals to dictate the use of their bodily materials. "Access to Online Local Government Public Records" by David S. Byrne dealt with what I felt was a more straightforward issue regarding people's rights to privacy. The issue in the article was mainly that local and state governments have to figure out how to maintain the privacy of individuals while still providing access to public records and maintaining transparency in government. While this article focused on governmental organizations, this is also an issue that librarians must deal with. What type of information regarding library patrons, if any, should be made available to the public? From what I've learned so far this semester, most libraries err on the side of privacy, and do not divulge any personal information about their patrons. This was evidenced in the section in This Book is Overdue, which told the story of the librarians who refused to provide information to the FBI on their patron's internet use.

The other two articles, in my opinion, brought up issues that are much more complex and do not seem to have any relatively easy solutions. They dealt with the use of human tissue in medical research. In such cases, the issue is not basic privacy; both articles describe how there is a general agreement that donors of tissues have the right to maintain anonymity. The bigger issue here, it seems, is autonomy, meaning whether or not individual donors have the right to decide the specific uses of their tissues after they are removed. I feel as though I lack the proper knowledge of law and property issues to take a very firm stance on this issue. As the article "Body of Research" by R. Alta Charo indicates, both sides have strengths and weaknesses. I do think that people should have the right to determine how their donated tissues are used. However, it would be problematic to label one's body as personal property. As Charo describes, doing so would possibly prevent the use of long-deceased cadavers in scientific research because they would become the property of their ancestors. I look forward to the discussion on this topic, because I'm sure I will hear many points of view that I haven't even considered.