Creators, Collectors, Communicators and Consolidators
Technology is changing the way in which information professionals work, calling for new skills and abilities. More significant, though, is the impact that the technological changes are having on the way in which information is used.
As technology pushes us towards an information-intensive society, we can see a marked change in the culture of information use. Up to the end of the 1980s relatively few people actively used information as part of their work or their daily lives. Those who did made relatively little use of technology and they processed information in quite simple ways. Information professionals were able to exercise a set of craft skills that set them apart from their users.
Now the situation has begun to change radically. More and more people are using information in their work and at home. There is more information around and it is more highly processed than ever before. User-friendly systems enable users to retrieve the information they need. And there is an expanding information industry promoting a culture of intensive information use. The skills gap between information professionals and their users is closing.
Information is becoming embedded in our culture, shaping the way in which we work, play and enrich ourselves. In such circumstances, what need is there for information professionals when everyone becomes more professional in their use of information?
Without doubt, the demand for information professionals will continue to expand. But the skills and abilities required by those professionals will be different from what we have known before. We will see, I believe, the emergence of four complementary groups of information professionals: Creators, Collectors Communicators and Consolidators.
Creators
The creators will be the ones who can develop and produce information products and services. They will need to be able to understand the technology to the extent that they can exploit its potential. They will need to be able to make information systems work and, above all, to make them work in the easiest possible way. It should be as easy to switch from using one information system to another as it is to switch from driving one car to another.
More and more organisations are developing new information services and activities to run alongside their other products. The explosion of the Internet now means that most organisations feel it necessary to have a presence of the World Wide Web. The development of electronic commerce will accelerate the trend.
We currently have a rapid growth in the sophistication of information-creation tools, from desk-top publishing to electronic translation. But we are only at the beginning of the process of automating the creation of information. For the foreseeable future, there will be a pressing need for people who understand information and how it works to be involved in the design of these information services.
A critical set of skills will be concerned with navigation. As more and more information becomes available, so a higher premium will be paid for people who are able to create web-sites that are easy to use and, at a different level, to develop gateways, maps and the other tools needed to find one's way around the system.
The creators will also need to be skilled in the complex set of processes associated with information design. They will need to understand how language works and how to use layout, typography and design principles to achieve the desired impact. During the 1980s we made great strides in advancing our understanding of how to design effective printed information. We now face the challenge of developing a comparable depth of understanding in relation to electronic information.
Collectors
Services like the Internet are extending dramatically our ability to access material. But someone, somewhere needs to build up collections of information that we can consult.
This is the traditional role of librarians, archivists and records managers. Their aim is to build up collections of information in anticipation of some future use. Collectors try to satisfy the current needs of their users but they are also trying to forecast the needs that will develop in the future and to collect the material that will satisfy that future demand. Information collections are not static; without constant maintenance their quality declines as the information grows older and new material is missed. The few collections of old, scholarly material are the exceptions that prove the general rule. Add to this the need for new approaches to the conservation of digital information.
Collectors need, above all, to understand the needs of their users. They must be fully aware of the overall aim and objectives of the organisations they serve and they must appreciate what users want from the collection. This often means distinguishing between expressed wants or demands and more basic, but often unstated, information needs. To complicate matters further, collectors need to be able to forecast how these requirements will change in the future so that they can have the material ready for use.
Clearly, the collectors need to be aware of the full range of material that is available for collection. For conventionally published material this is relatively easy but as information technology makes it easier and easier to produce information , so it becomes more difficult to keep track of the items that appear outside the formal publishing system. Once aware of the available material, the collectors need to be able to select the items that will make the greatest contribution to the collection the items that will add most value and that will retain their value longest. They also need to make judgement about when it is appropriate to buy an item and when to rely on inter library loan and document delivery systems. The overall value of the collection is determined by the quality of all these selection decisions.
The growth in the amount of information in digital form presents further problems for professionals building up collections of information. They need somehow to capture relevant resources that are only available in digital form, many of which may have an unpredictable life on the Web.
Having selected and acquired the material, the next task is to organise it and make it accessible for the users. Classification and cataloguing are skills that are often under valued, yet they provide the key to a collection of information, whether classifying documents or constructing Internet gateways.
Information collections need constant revision and maintenance. The value of nearly all information materials declines over time. Some major national and international collections derive their strength from the fact that they retain a copy of everything but for most collections it is necessary to revise constantly, weeding out material that is no longer valuable to make room for new information.
Communicators
Information comes best when wrapped in a person. Those who claim that we will satisfy all our information needs through the networks misunderstand the nature of information needs and information-seeking behaviour. True, we will make greater and greater use of electronic information. But, as our use of information becomes more sophisticated, we will need recourse to information specialists who can help us find the answer to our problems by tailoring the information provided to our particular circumstances.
Such information professionals will work in a wide range of situations such as small-firms advisory centres; citizens advice bureaux, health information services, financial advisory services, travel agencies and even management consultancies, which in one sense are simply a rarefied sub-set of the information-communicator group.
The communicators will need a high level of inter-personal skills. They will need to be able to modify and adjust their service to suit the personality characteristics of the person with whom they are communicating.
They will need to be able to analyse people's requirements very quickly, distinguishing between actual needs and expressed demands for information. They will have to analyse and select the information that is available, using that which most directly meets the user's requirements. They also need to be able to find and retrieve the required information quickly and efficiently. This usually means that they have to be very good at organising their own information resources.
Consider what happens when someone goes into a travel agency wanting to find the holiday that will best meet the different requirements of the family members. Or what happens when someone approaches a health information service concerned that their doctor has mis-diagnosed a serious condition. In such circumstances the information professional has to analyse a complex set of circumstances, re-define the problem in information terms, select and then retrieve the most appropriate bits of information and communicate it all to the individual in the most accessible and acceptable way.
Clearly, many communicators need a high level of subject knowledge. The service users will expect to be able to trust the knowledge and judgement of the person communicating the information to them. The greater the depth of subject knowledge, the greater the authority that is accorded to the information. It is for this reason that many professional information communicators regard themselves first as subject specialists and seldom think of themselves as information professionals at all. Yet the subject knowledge only becomes really useful when complemented by a set of information communication skills.
Consolidators
The consolidators are the people who will make sense of the world for managers. They will act as the filters and the researchers, working as part of a management team.
We read much about decision-support systems and executive information systems. All of these are fine for dealing with pre-defined information needs. The more sophisticated ones can accommodated more uncertainty and unpredictability, but they require managers to spend significant amounts of time getting the system to come up with the answers.
The concept of knowledge management has also become very fashionable. In essence, it represents an attempt by organisations to come to terms with the need to manage an asset that is growing in importance as we move towards more information-intensive ways of working.
Few managers have enough time to spend gathering, processing and interpreting all the information they need. And it is unlikely that they ever will. Systems become more sophisticated, enabling people to processed greater amounts of information. But the very process of development that enables the systems to become more sophisticated also has the effect of increasing the volume and complexity of the information available. The actual task of making sense of the information in order to come to a decision does not become any less time-consuming. It certainly becomes more technically complex.
For these reasons there will always be scope for division of labour and for the creation of posts for information professionals to reduce the burden on managers.
The consolidators will need to be very adept at collecting information. In some circumstances they will do this by searching databases and other secondary sources. In others they will collect and process the information themselves. In either case they will be called upon to combine information from different sources to provide a richer picture of the world. Without such combination and consolidation managers will continue to try to use two-dimensional information to make sense of a three-dimensional world.
This calls for a high level of skill in the analysis and synthesis of information. The consolidators will need to be able to see the patterns and make the connections in the information they process. They will need to be able to interpret the information in the light of the circumstances faced by the organisation for which they work.
Finally, consolidators will need to be able to present the results of their work effectively, whether orally or in writing. Above all else, this calls for the ability to reduce complexity without sacrificing accuracy.
Working in an information-intensive world
There is little doubt that there will be a greater general need for information skills in the future. Few jobs will remain unaffected by the information revolution. There will be a need to enhance the general level of information-handling skills so that people can come to terms with the use of information at work and within their daily lives. But this will not obviate the need for skilled professionals to take on the specialist tasks and to provide others with an occasional helping hand.
Issues for educators
These developments raise a number of issues for the educators of information professionals.
Boundaries
First, there is the question of where the boundaries lie. As information work changes, where should we place the boundaries around our courses of study. Take, for example, the need to develop information design skills. This could involve students in the study of graphic design, typography, the psychology of information use and assimilation. More generally, there is scope for moving the boundaries to include much more information technology, organisational management, intellectual property law and statistics. The traditional boundaries of the library and information curriculum have been changing for some time - that process of change seems likely to continue.
On the other side of the side of the boundaries, lie a number of other professions that would benefit from developing a higher level of information management skill. Information educators should, perhaps, be looking to develop specialist modules in courses for engineers, lawyers, doctors and business managers, indeed any occupation that calls for information-intensive ways of working.
Speed of response
The speed with which educational institutions can respond to change is also becoming more critical. The changes in the information sphere that have come about as a result of the Internet are staggering and they have taken place largely over the last five years. Yet for undergraduate degrees, it often takes five years between the start of a course deign process and the completion of that course by the first graduates. If education for information work is to remain fully relevant to changing circumstances, then course approval and modification procedures need to be greatly streamlined.
Flexibility and adaptability
This raises the issue of flexibility and adaptability. In Britain, and possibly elsewhere, the understandable desire for quality assurance is tending to create rigidities in the system. It becomes less and less easy to modify courses as the proceed and to adapt them to changing circumstances. We must endeavour to find a way to reconcile the desire to monitor quality with the need for flexibility.
Marketing
As educators, we should address the need to market our courses and the students that they produce. By this I mean more than just publicising and promoting. What is needed is a full marketing approach, starting from careful analysis of needs and requirements; regular monitoring of market conditions; the design of products - courses - that are aimed at particular market segments and then the vigorous promotion of the courses to prospective students and the graduates to prospective employers.
Here information educators face a dilemma. Should they design courses that will bring prestige to their institutions and attract large number of the right kinds of students? Or should they design courses that will produce graduates that are highly desired by employers? In other words, the course designers need to address two quite distinct markets. All too often, course designers are unclear about which market they are addressing. We need much greater clarity.
Teaching staff
Educators do much more than teach. They serve as role models for the students and they portray an impression of the institution and its courses to potential employers. We need, therefore, to be able to attract not only the most able teachers but also people who are fully abreast of the most recent developments, who have credibility among their colleagues in employing institutions and who will attract and inspire the best potential information professionals. I suspect that we have not always been able to achieve this in the past.
We should re-consider the desirability of library and information education becoming a career in its own right. The regular transfer between work in an educational institution and employment in - dare I say it - the real world should produce real benefits by breaking down some of the barriers between education and practice and by introducing up-to-date practical experience into the education process.
Novel teaching and learning approaches
Allied to the need for inspiring teachers is the need for novel teaching and learning approaches. Many information professionals, for example, will come to the work after a period spent doing something else. An engineer, for example, may take on responsibility for information-handling within the organisation and may soon come to realise the need to develop new skills and understandings. It will not be possible for them to leave their job for a year or so to undertake a conventional course of study. They will be looking for innovative approaches to the delivery of courses that will enable them to develop the skills and, perhaps acquire a qualification, while continuing to hold down a full-time job.
As information professionals, we should also be able to demonstrate our familiarity with information technology by exploiting the potential it offers for innovative delivery of interesting and challenging material. There is great and growing scope for distance learning.
Conclusion
The development of information-intensive societies has placed new demands on information professionals and calls for new sets of skills and abilities. This, in turn, produces a need for change in the ways we educate our information professionals.