BFTP: Michael Jensen's information ecosystem
Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 09:00AM A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post, May 6, 2006.
"Today, if something's not available digitally, it's rapidly becoming as good as invisible." Michael Jensen.
As a part of the College of DuPage's Library Challenges and Opportunities April 28, 2006 teleconference, "Google Book Search," Michael Jensen, Director of Publishing Technologies at the National Academies Press, listed a number of ways in which one type of information is becoming more valued than another by today's searchers.
Here is the list he shared. When it comes to information:
- Free trumps cost.
- Open trumps firewalled.
- Easy trumps intricate.
- Fast sufficiency trumps clumsy quality.
- Integrated/linked trumps siloed.
- Findable trumps precise.
- Recommended trumps available.
- Updateable trumps static.
What Jensen shared is what a number of us see happening with K-12 students and their information seeking/using behaviors. They (and many adults, me included) are "satisfic-ing."
While Jensen is looking at information ecosystems through a scholarly publishing lens, we as school librarians and teachers need to be thinking about what this evolution means in regard to our programs and resources as well.
- Are our libraries/schools providing information resources that are "free, open, easy, fast, integrated, findable, recommended, and updateable" or "costly, firewalled, intricate, clumsy, siloed, unfindable and static?"
- Is there any reason to be buying print reference materials?
- How hard do we struggle against this evolutionary trend, working to put "quality" information into students' hands and ask that they give it priority in their own research?
- How do we as educators need to adapt to a new environment ourselves?
- Are we really committed to teaching the evaluation of information quality? Are we making any head-way getting all teachers interested in teaching kids about evaluating the quality of information?
- What must libraries do to successfully evolve given the evolving relationship people seem to have with information?
Reader Comments (3)
Your post contain very useful information .Keep blogging.
Michael Jensen's information ecosystem is similar to the Zen of Open Data:
The Zen of Open Data, by Chris McDowall
Open is better than closed.
Transparent is better than opaque.
Simple is better than complex.
Accessible is better than inaccessible.
Sharing is better than hoarding.
Linked is more useful than isolated.
Fine grained is preferable to aggregated.
(Although there are legitimate privacy and security limitations.)
Optimise for machine readability — they can translate for humans.
Barriers prevent worthwhile things from happening.
“Flawed, but out there” is a million times better than “perfect, but unattainable”.
Opening data up to thousands of eyes makes the data better.
Iterate in response to demand.
Thanks for sharing this, Mohan. They are very similar and both quite true, I think.
Doug