This article – Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google – from Forbes, a US business magazine, is a great read. It is especially inspiring for librarians in schools and those working in companies. Here are some particularly good quotes:

As a former corporate lawyer, I owe much of my success to effective research skills that evolved, with the help of skilled trainers, as new tools came along. As a former executive officer at a company that had 1,200 employees in 29 countries worldwide, I know that without adequate media literacy training, kids will not succeed in a 21st-century workplace

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In a recent study of fifth grade students in the Netherlands, most never questioned the credibility of a Web site, even though they had just completed a course on information literacy. When my company asked 300 school students how they searched, nearly half answered: “I type a question.” When we asked how students knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were “if it sounds good” or “if it has the information I need.” Equally dismal was their widespread failure to check a source’s date, author or citations.

This is troubling for it implies that information literacy training, at least in this specific Dutch case, is failing. One possible explanation is laziness – critical evaluation of information takes longer than simply applying the first thing you find. Yet, I am reluctant to accept the suggestion that laziness is the whole explanation.

Students at many elite schools are learning critical 21st century skills while librarians are eliminated from budget-stressed school districts. The result? What a University College of London study called a “new divide,” with students who have access to librarians “taking the prize of better grades” while those who don’t have access to school librarians showing up at college beyond hope, having “already developed an ingrained coping behaviour: they have learned to ‘get by’ with Google.

I’m very conflicted about this observation. On the one hand, it clearly demonstrates the critical contribution that librarians make to education. On the other hand, it highlights just how great the challenges are to bringing education to all. I do believe that everybody has the right to participate in a rich education and that librarians have an important role. Without the foundation of skills to do research, find relevant information and evaluate it, college and university study becomes close to impossible and career success is equally undermined. If you’re still coming across people that think that Internet search engines eliminate the need for librarians, here’s yet another way to show them the error of their ways.

Last week, I attended an event jointly organized by Knowledge Workers Toronto and the SLA Toronto Chapter called Dealing with Information Overload. The presenter, Karl Dawson of phiScape AG, has proposed a solution to information overload using software. The application he presented is still in the early stages but I gather that it is intended to automatically generate two types of results: summaries and indexes. I think the concept of it is that the software essentially takes a first pass at reading the text and then gives the actual human reader less to go through. I can see some potential for this kind of approach in terms of improving reader productivity.

The potential benefit of this system goes something like this.: if you could read fifty news article in an hour, maybe I could read a hundred news summaries in less time. I should reserve judgement on this approach but I’ve seen things like this before and have not found them that helpful. If you read a series of 10-50 news summaries on events around the world, how informed do you feel? It is the difference between reading the International Herald Tribune and reading the actual New York Times and Washington Post. You can cover more ground in a sense but I wonder if you get more out of it. Still, the presenter made the point that most popular reading innovations lately – such as the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader – are basically aiming to replicate the experience of reading a print book in digital form. This reminds me of the early decades after printing came to Europe; some people thought that manuscript books were far superior and some printers responded by trying to make printed books look like manuscripts (or having scribes add finishing touches to a printed book). In hindsight, that was just a sign of a transition from one technology to another.

Can you think of any technologies or tools available that actually improve on the reading experience? Make it more pleasant? Or perhaps more productive? I will happily agree that the invention of hypertext (and XML) in the 1990s was a big leap forward, but what else is happening in the reading technology world?

As one of the most heavily used public libraries in North America, the Toronto Public Library is an important institution in the library community. I often use the Library’s resources online and visit branches and always feel good about my experiences. Recently, I started following TPL’s announcements on Facebook just to see how the institution is making its presence felt in that area. It was through Facebook that I learned that TPL is launching a new website which you can know see in beta. I’ve taken a screenshot below to preserve what it looked like in March 2010:

I see several interesting contrasts with TPL’s current website. The overall size of the site is bigger; it goes “over the fold” in my browser. It strikes me as a much more intense Web experience compared with the current site, but absolutely nothing wrong with that. I also see a much greater emphasis on events; you can see that Globe & Mail writer Margaret Wente has a talk at TPL in April and that the library is participating in an event called “Keep Toronto Toronto Reading Festival.” The centre block of the site – which highlights new items in the collections including children’s fiction – reminds me of the University of Toronto Library website that also highlights recent items. Overall, the site’s design looks like it will be more dynamic and there is a higher chance of seeing new and interesting information here every time I come to visit. Access to the collections, catalogue and other library programs is still clear to me. The site is friendly and I would have to give it high marks. You can read about the planning and thinking behind the redesign on the TPL’s Web Team blog. The Web Team is to be commended for their extensive communication and efforts to consult with users in this process.

On a different note, I also came across some statistics on TPL’s performance in 2009 and the data is impressive. For anybody that thinks that public libraries are losing popularity or are failing to deliver the services and collections people want, these kind of statistics really counter that way of thinking. According to a January 19, 2010 press release, the Toronto Public Library had a record year of usage in 2009:

• The number of materials borrowed (over 31 million) jumped by 5 percent over 2008
• People visited the library’s 99 branches 17.5 million times, up 8.5% from last year
• eTitles (including eBooks, eAudiobooks and music files) were borrowed 88% more than in 2008
• In-branch computer use increased by 11.5%

After reading Thomas L Friedman’s columns in the New York Times for months and part of his earlier book on globalization, The Olive Tree and the Lexus, I decided to pick up his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First Century. Some of the technology aspects of the book have dated a bit since the book was first published in 2005, but other aspects of the book remain fresh and very interesting. At times, the book can be scary as Friedman lavishes page after page describing brilliant, driven and successful scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from India and China. You almost have the sense that if you make the slightest misstep, a thousand highly educated Indians will immediately take your job through outsourcing. In continuing to read through the book and critically evaluate it, I realize some of these concerns are slightly exaggerated. Still, the highly competitive nature of the global economy cannot be denied. Friedman suggests that there are some skills that remain critical in helping individuals (and organizations) thrive in an age of global competition: learning how to learn, navigation, compassion and curiousity. I think librarians exhibit and can foster all of those qualities. I’d particularly like to focus on the navigation idea since the concept of “knowledge navigators” was explored in the SLA alignment project.

Friedman writes about navigation in the seventh chapter of The World is Flat:

Second, we need to think more about how we teach navigation skills. As the world flattens out, more and more knowledge, information, news, software, commerce, and communities will reside on the World Wide Web. Out children will interact with each other, with the wider world, and with all that resides on the Web without many filters. Therefore, teaching them how to navigate that virtual world, and how to sift through it and separate the noise, the filth, and the lies from the facts, the wisdom, and the real sources of knowledge becomes more important than ever. When the Web first emerged, I used to joke that if I had one fervent wish it would be that every modem sold would come with a warning label from the surgeon general that would say: “Judgement Not Included.” (pg. 310-311)

If I ever have to explain or define what “information literacy” is again to a non-librarian, I will refer them to this quote. A high and ever increasing volume of information does not eliminate the need for librarians in any way. Formerly, librarians based their work on a scarcity of knowledge, but I’ve learned that every kind of abundance creates a different need or scarcity elsewhere. With an abundance of information, judgement and time to organize it and make use it of it is lacking. That’s one way that librarians will continue to stay relevant and valuable.

In February, the faculty of Harvard Business School voted to adopt an open access policy for its research. In terms of scholarly communication, I regard this as a significant shift. From what I understand of the progress of the open access movement, it has been adopted in the sciences (especially medical and life sciences) community to the greatest degree. In browsing the website of the Office of Scholarly Communication and the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) Repository, I found only one article from the Business School, but the policy has only been in effect a month. Many other universities that adopted open access four or five years ago are still in the process of implementing it  – open access is important but it can be time consuming to fully implement. As one of the world’s leading centres of business and management research, I expect that this will be a fascinating resource.