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5856 results in Facet Publishing

Page 110 of 293

  • Foreword

    • By Anne J. Gilliland, Professor, Department of Information Studies, Director, Center for Information as Evidence, University of California Los Angeles
  • David Thomas, Simon Fowler
  • Book:
    The Silence of the Archive
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    11 May 2017, pp xv-xviii

  • Summary

    In 2016, the wreck of a German submarine that sank on 30 April 1918 was discovered during a survey off the coast of Stranraer in Scotland. The discovery quickly caught the imagination of social media users because of the story that the submarine's captain had told, at the time of his capture, of the submarine being attacked by a ferocious sea monster. Historian and archaeologist Innes McCartney argues that mariners’ stories of sea monster attacks are not that uncommon, perhaps due to the fact that crews were often on missions where, for intelligence or national security reasons, they were not permitted to discuss what actually took place, and that for the same reasons the official records of the events were sealed.

    While this is an eye-catching, if perhaps not the most immediately significant anecdote, it does illustrate an important point. The absence of records from public view, the absence of certain details in records that are available, or the absence of records altogether, are what drive not only frustrations and disappointments with the archive but also archival fantasies. In recent years Big Data initiatives, not to mention Hollywood, the video game industry and countless other popular media, have reinforced and even glamorized the public image of the archive as the ultimate repository of facts and the hope of future generations for uncovering ‘what actually happened’. The reality is, however, that for all sorts of reasons the record may not have been preserved or survived in the archive. In fact, the record may never even have existed – its creation being as imagined as is its contents. And even if it does exist, it may be silent on the salient facts, or it may obfuscate, mislead or flat out lie.

    As a result, archives and their contents are subject to many of the same longings, hopes and fears that we see rippling through wider society today, their silences providing fertile ground for imaginings, part-truths and the promulgation of ‘alternative facts’. But at the same time, as David Thomas rightfully reminds us in this book, certain voids in archives may also function as positive or humanly necessary spaces – tacit agreements and ellipses designed to leave unsaid or let slip away things that may be too painful, too problematic, too love-laden or too explicit to capture.

  • 6 - Solutions to the silence

    • By Valerie Johnson, Director of Research and Collections at The National Archives
  • David Thomas, Simon Fowler
  • Book:
    The Silence of the Archive
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    11 May 2017, pp 141-162

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This book has described a number of factors which have resulted in gaps in the information held by archives: what we have termed silences. This chapter will discuss the role of various actors in the documentary and archival process in filling those gaps, the joint responsibility for change, and possible paths ahead to avoid new gaps appearing in the future.

    Is legislation the answer?

    First to the question of who is responsible for the documentation of society. It has been the implicit argument of this book that we are all responsible, whether as creators of records or professional curators of those papers, or as users, researchers, historians, and informed citizens of societies to whom we have responsibility.

    Of course, in every state and country, there exists legislation, which lays down legal duties and responsibilities relating to records. But life is about more than legislation, and legislation itself can have unintended consequences. The Freedom of Information Act in the UK was heralded as opening up access to information much sooner than previously, and as a vehicle towards greater government accountability and transparency. However, fears have also been expressed that it is leading creators to avoid writing down information that is subject to the Act or other accountability initiatives, to preclude its disclosure (for this view, see, for example, Moss, 2012).

    Sebina (2009), writing on the implications of the passing of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) in South Africa in 2000, remarked that it has by no means led to full and open access. Fear of taking responsibility for the decision to open, fear of recriminations for one's own career or simply a general culture of fear can lead to a default to closure. Findlay has hinted of similar issues in Australia:

    … here in Australia, despite much talk of an ‘open government’, the reality for those seeking to extract information under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws can be quite the opposite. Too often, vague references to national security are used to exempt material, part of the longer theme of fear, paranoia and secrecy that has underpinned much public policy since 9/11.

    (Findlay, 2013, 9)

  • 4 - From transaction to transformation: organizational learning and knowledge creation experience within Informed Systems

  • Edited by Marc Forster
  • Book:
    Information Literacy in the Workplace
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 41-56

  • Summary

    This chapter will discuss:

    • an organizational approach known as Informed Systems, which builds learning conditions and knowledge creation experiences that result in a workplace which uses information effectively to learn, adapt and perform.

    Introduction

    This chapter describers the Informed Systems approach to building organizational learning conditions and knowledge creation experiences through effective workplace communication systems and information practices. Informed Systems, which has its roots in relational Information Literacy (IL) (see Chapter 2), integrates constructivist learning, systems thinking and knowledge creation theories to advance ‘Informed Learning’, the experience of using information to learn, within constructed workplace ecosystems. Activated as action research and enacted through participatory co-design, this approach focuses on collective inquiry to further learning relationships and Informed Learning experiences (i.e. advances both information and learning experiences simultaneously). Associated professional practices facilitated by both technology- and human-enabled workplace communication systems guide the experience of using information to learn. Such experiences are amplified by dialogue and reflection, to foster knowledge creation for ‘learning in action’. Central to the Informed Systems approach is nimble thought leadership and collaborative information-focused activities, customizable to changing local situ - ations that foster Informed Learning capacity in the contemporary workplace.

    In this chapter, workplace IL is understood to be the experience of using information to learn, in the tradition of the relational approach to IL. In The Seven Faces of Information Literacy and Informed Learning, Bruce (1997; 2008) presents insights into the experience of using information to learn through a relational approach. The early research results include four principles integral to the relational view and seven faces (facets or categories) representing qualitatively different ways of experiencing the use of information to learn. In depicting the phenomenon as a whole, these principles and categories represent an integration of experiential, contextual and transformational information experiences, which departed from the predominant behavioural research and skills-based education in vogue when she released her findings.

Successful Enquiry Answering Every Time
  • Thinking Your Way from Problem to Solution
  • Tim Buckley Owen
  • Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017
  • This book guides the reader step-by-step through all stages of the research process, from finding out what the enquirer really wants, to providing a polished, actionable, value-added answer.

  • 11 - The ‘Workplace Experience Framework’ and evidence-based Information Literacy education

  • Edited by Marc Forster
  • Book:
    Information Literacy in the Workplace
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 149-164

  • Summary

    This chapter will discuss:

  • • a new approach to IL education for students and professionals based on detailed research into its experience in the workplace.

  • • how the ‘relational’ approach to IL education has, through research methods which yield exceptional detail, made possible the ‘Workplace Experience Framework’. This is a guide to the structure, content and method of an evidence-based IL educational intervention, based on the range of themes and complexities of experience of IL in a workplace or profession.

  • • how that detail of experience can be applied to formulate a new means of monitoring an individual's IL development.

    • Please note: It is strongly advised that you read Chapter 2 before reading this chapter, as many of the research findings and ideas used below are introduced there and often discussed in more detail.

    Introduction

    In order that a professional can begin a career in the workplace using information effectively, in the context of the knowledge development and learning required for individual, team and organizational functionality, part of professional education should involve IL education of the kind appropriate for that workplace. In Chapter 8, page 111, Annemaree Lloyd suggests that students’ IL development requires a transition from an academic or ‘preparatory’ setting to a workplace one:

    Librarians are placed in unique positions to mediate the educational and discipline/workplace landscapes in order to identify knowledge, competencies and skills that students will require while studying and when in transition to the workplace.

    This chapter attempts to show one way in which workplace IL education might be based on detailed experiences of IL in the workplace, so that students are inducted into information experiences relevant to their work culture or profession. The chapter may be of particular interest to librarians attempting to develop IL in professional workers, and academics keen to develop in their students the skills that new professionals need in order to function effectively and ethically in the workplace.

    In what ways has the development of IL traditionally been encouraged? Historically, the literature describes attempts to develop what are felt to be relevant skills and knowledge, based on behaviourist or constructivist approaches (Brettle, 2003 and 2007; Elrod, Wallace and Sirigos, 2012).

  • 7 - Information Literacy's role in workplace competence, ‘best practice’ and the ethics of professional obligation

  • Edited by Marc Forster
  • Book:
    Information Literacy in the Workplace
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 85-96

  • Summary

    This chapter will discuss:

  • • how being information-literate in the workplace is to be ethical. The ethically information-literate employee seeks to develop their knowledge to a level which allows them to most effectively address the needs of patient, customer or client. Not to be information-literate may result in harmful outcomes.

  • • how this exhibits itself in IL's role in the achievement of competence, and beyond this in the quest for ‘best practice’: the most effective and efficient way to achieve the best outcome for patients or clients, based on all relevant information effectively analysed and integrated into the knowledge base.

    • Introduction

    As is well known, IL is often ignored, or regarded as a preoccupation only of librarians, or something only relevant in academic settings. How can we persuade businesses and organizations, professionals and other workers of its necessity? In fact, IL has a particular key role to play in work life that is arguably more fundamental than any other discussed in this book: an ethical role.

    This chapter discusses the idea of the necessity of IL in the workplace. That is, its ethical necessity, which is found in the requirement of professionals, indeed all employees, to operate at maximum effectiveness for the highest possible safety and benefit of customers, patients and clients (Forster, 2013). In the information-rich modern workplace, this effectiveness requires the optimum search/differentiation, critique and application of all relevant information. An ill-informed professional is a potentially incompetent, even dangerous, one. A professional who has failed to develop, or sought to develop and maintain, the ability to identify information lack, search for and identify all relevant information and critique it in order to maintain professional knowledge levels, and practises from that incomplete knowledge base, is practising unethically.

    This is not a common way of looking at IL's role and value. However, there is little question that its wider adoption and promotion by librarians would further strengthen its profile, and help increase an awareness of its proper value in the workplace.

    Awareness of Information Literacy's vital role

    This chapter's origins can be traced to something unexpected in the IL experiences of a representative sample of professional workers.

  • 5 - Help! Everything's going wrong Using lateral thinking to get out of difficulties

  • Tim Buckley Owen
  • Book:
    Successful Enquiry Answering Every Time
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 87-106

  • Summary

    ‘The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley’, wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns, musing on how easy it can be for things suddenly to go pear-shaped. How true! If you've stayed with us thus far your schemes will indeed have been ‘best laid’ ones. You'll have analysed the enquirer's needs to establish precisely what they want without any ambiguities, exercised your imagination to work out logically where the answer can be found, and searched systematically and professionally for the information you need. But you still can't find it, and time's running out.

    It would be all too easy to feel the panic returning at a time like this. Enquirers really do think that the web has it all and you can get at it instantly, and that can trap you into agreeing to an unrealistic deadline despite your efforts to avoid it. So what you need to do is to manage their expectations while making sure you can deliver what you've promised – which is why it's so important to settle the matter of the deadline from the outset (as we discussed in Chapter 1).

    But is the deadline always your problem? It clearly is if your job is to find information on behalf of other people. But what about when it's a student who's come to you with a really complex assignment which (as they so often seem to do) they've started far too late. Well, to be hard-nosed about it, you have two choices. You can tell them it's their problem and they should have thought of it sooner, leaving them to go off disgruntled with you and the library – or possibly to waste the time of a colleague on another desk in a different department.

    Or you can demonstrate your professionalism in advising them what they can do in the limited time available, thereby casting yourself in the role of mentor rather than critic.

Information Literacy in the Workplace
  • Edited by Marc Forster
  • Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017
  • This book explains how information literacy (IL) is essential to the contemporary workplace and is fundamental to competent, ethical and evidence-based practice. In today’s information-driven workplace, information professionals must know when research evidence or relevant legal, business, personal or other information is required, how to find it, how to critique it and how to integrate it into one’s knowledge base. To fail to do so may result in defective and unethical practice which could have devastating consequences for clients or employers. There is an ethical requirement for information professionals to meet best practice standards to achieve the best outcome possible for the client. This demands highly focused and complex information searching, assessment and critiquing skills.

  • 4 - Smarter searching Developing efficient search strategies by thinking systematically

  • Tim Buckley Owen
  • Book:
    Successful Enquiry Answering Every Time
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 65-86

  • Summary

    There's a saying in show business that amateurs rehearse so that everything goes right and professionals rehearse so that nothing goes wrong. It's a great definition of the difference between an amateur and a professional, in any profession.

    Just think how it works with a show. Amateurs haven't a clue what could go wrong, so they have to rehearse everything equally. Professionals have the training, the knowledge, the experience to know where the danger points are in a production – the rapid scene change, the complex piece of business – and concentrate on those. Yet amateurs can manage to put on a good show eventually, with practice. And exactly the same applies to one of the most hazardous parts of enquiry work: searching.

    The problem is that, since everyone has access now to an apparently limitless pool of instantly available information, anyone can assume that they're an expert searcher. So information professionals – the ones who earn their living by searching, or advising people on how to search – have to be able to demonstrate that there are ways of searching smarter, even when they're using exactly the same tools as their enquirers. What can distinguish you, the professional, from your enquirer, the amateur? A lot of it is down to thinking systematically.

    Who needs to be able to search smarter?

    The short answer is: everyone. It doesn't matter whether you're doing the searching yourself or helping others to do so, you need to understand the principles behind it so that the whole process happens as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Just think why …

    If you're working in a public reference library you may well find yourself dealing with people to whom searching doesn't come naturally. A personal visitor may require a lot of hand-holding while you help them discover the information they need. At the same time, a queue may be building up at the enquiry desk – or, if you've gone on an expedition to the shelves with your enquirer, other people may start hovering round waiting for you to become free.

  • 1 - What do they really want? Using your analytical thinking skills to understand the question

  • Tim Buckley Owen
  • Book:
    Successful Enquiry Answering Every Time
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 1-26

  • Summary

    Picture the scene. You're in the kitchen getting ready for a dinner party and you think your partner has just said: ‘Have you got the time?’ So you could reply: ‘It's ten to eight and the guests are going to be here any moment, so let's get on with it.’ Or you could say: ‘Do you mean what time is it now or how long does it take to cook?’ To which your partner replies patiently: ‘No, darling – did you remember to buy the thyme?’

    By simply telling your partner the time you'll have taken the question at face value. But by answering the question with a question you'll have dealt with any potential misunderstanding from the outset – and in this case, misunderstanding there certainly was. The question used in this little domestic drama was a forced choice question – one of several specific question types, each of which can be deployed for a particular purpose. In this instance, it helped to defuse a little bit of potential personal strife. When you use this and other questioning techniques at work, it can save you a deal of trouble from the outset.

    You'll deal with many of your enquirers orally, face to face. The possibilities for misunderstandings are endless – accent, articulation, assumptions, all can send you scurrying off in totally the wrong direction, wasting both your time and the enquirer's. But with face-to-face enquiries, you are at least offered lots of clues; most of what we communicate is nonverbal, so you are able to glean what you can from facial expression, eye contact, body language. But you are deprived of these clues when your queries come in by phone, and you have even less to go on when they arrive in written form – by e-mail or text for instance. We'll look at remote enquiry handling in Chapter 2 – but right now, let's assume that the enquirer is standing in front of you. In our journey from what the enquirer asked to what they actually wanted to know, we need to deploy our analytical thinking skills.

  • 9 - Developing information professional competences in disciplinary domains: a challenge for higher education

  • Edited by Marc Forster
  • Book:
    Information Literacy in the Workplace
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 113-130

  • Summary

    This chapter will discuss:

  • • the ways in which higher orders of information professional competence, including Information Literacy (IL), can be introduced into programmes of higher education teaching and learning.

  • • how such an approach to information professional education can lead to a deeper and wider dissemination across workplace occupations and domains, and see these competences embedded in organizational learning and personal development.

    • Introduction

    Information Literacy is the child of an age when there was a clear and purposeful link between physical documents as the primary stores of recorded information and libraries and other physical locations as repositories. The principles and practices of librarianship provided the main means of management of content and access. For all the detail and complexity that lay behind this relationship, the user, in any form and from any perspective, was presented with a straightforward and largely linear model of access and use. Information Literacy could be constructed on the premise that a map of the bibliographical terrain could be perceived, tools designed to provide access and means found to obtain what the user needed. Not quite a one-dimensional environment but one in which a clear underlying logic could be presented to help complete the information cycle from production to consumption. The search for information and the mastery of the tools to access it can be viewed as a two-dimensional spatial problem. Providing IL (as it is now called) – or its contemporary equivalents of ‘reader advice’ (pre-1960s), user education’ (1960s), ‘information skills’ (1970s and 1980s) and ‘inform - ation education’ (from the 1990s onwards) – started with a default position of a skill transfer from librarian or information professional to reader and user. Some ideas of the substance and complexity of these issues have been ably reviewed by Nigel Ford (Ford, 2004; 2008) and are carried forward by fellow contributors to this collection.

    However, the impetus was slowly changing from a librarian-centric view towards the user-centric view. Making the goal a shift of power from librarian or information professional to the user was very much in tune with educational and pedagogical theory. The skilled and informed user would be transformed into an independent learner and then be set on a path to independent and critical thinking.

  • 2 - Why remote enquiry handling is different Anticipating problems by thinking empathetically

  • Tim Buckley Owen
  • Book:
    Successful Enquiry Answering Every Time
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2017, pp 27-46

  • Summary

    ‘Please listen carefully to the following three options: To annoy the customer, press 1; to waste everybody's time, press 2; to lose business, press 3.’

    Up to now we've been assuming that your encounter with the enquirer has been face to face; we've learned quite a bit about what can go wrong if you don't anticipate potential misunderstandings and be ready to deal with them before they happen. But at least you've had plenty of other clues – besides what you and the enquirer actually say to one another – to reinforce your suspicion that things might be going wrong.

    You might detect a pained expression flitting across the enquirer's face as they realize that they're not getting their needs across. They might be drumming their fingers with impatience at the lack of progress, or standing with their arms akimbo as if to demand an explanation. Or they might be avoiding eye contact with you – indicating, perhaps, that they have something to hide or, worse, that they don't have confidence in your ability to help them.

    When you observe ‘tells’ like this, that does at least give you an opportunity to take remedial action. But when you can't see, and sometimes can't even hear, your enquirer, you have none of these clues to draw upon, and that means that even more things can go wrong than we encountered in Chapter 1.

    As the quote at the start of this chapter indicates, remote contact centres tend to have a pretty terrible reputation. But when you do encounter a good one, you'll find it leads the way in high-quality customer service. That lesson applies just as much to information services as it does to those provided by banks, travel firms or IT helpdesks. Like them or loathe them, people are expecting more and more of the services they need to be delivered remotely.

    They may be students who want instant guidance from their university resource centre before embarking on their own literature search online.

Page 110 of 293