A post by Bill Harris at “Dubious Quality” with the title Information got caught up in my Technorati filter for disruptive change in libraries. Geoff Engelstein, a colleague of Bill’s mentioned this in an e-mail:
We were a generation of information explorers. They [Geoff's thirteen– and eleven-year-olds] are a generation of editors.
The context is a reflection on Bill’s part of the trials and feelings of success when conducting research: “you’d have to pull out a rack in the card catalog according to the alphabetized subject and flip through the cards. If you got lucky, the title of a book or a brief description would point you in the right direction. Then you had to actually find the book, skim through it, and hope that you’d find some information.” Bill even includes a link to a bibliographic instruction page showing how an actual card catalog works.
Geoff’s observation is that “the big skill [his kids] are learning is what information to dump and what to keep” — hence the comparison to the work of an editor.
This has to get one thinking — are the services we are building for the information explorers or the information editors?
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I still remember the 4th grade science assignment (1980) that I flunked because I could not find any information on the Virginia Rail.
Today, all I would have to do is start at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Rail
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