My Lesson from the Brown Reading, "The Social Life of Information"

(by Nancy - Jasper is sleeping next to me on all of my school papers and has not read the Brown article)

Information cannot exist in a vacuum; it needs to be understood within a particular context, which hopefully, leads us to knowledge. I could not help but be reminded of that ladder of wisdom we learned about in Organizing Information class: data leads to information which leads to knowledge which ultimately leads to wisdom. If we, as librarians, are “information specialists,” we must seriously consider what that means; what is our role in the accumulation of information and how it is shared with others? This kind of reading always leads to more questions for me (or is this just a hangover from critical question assignments of Human Information Behavior???)

Something else that Brown’s chapter on “Re-Education” reminded me of - the changes in educational structuring are being mirrored in libraries. We are moving towards the virtual library, the library of the digital age: live chat with a librarian, remote access to databases, e-books, etc. As in education, where technological advances do not signal the end of the college campus, in library services these advances do not signal the end of the physical library. This is its movement into another phase, one that allows us more options and adapts to the evolving needs of our society.