LIBRARIAN

a necessary role that we haven't wrote about nor discussed much.

Task that needs solving is to organize documents according to organizational social contract, or values system expressed otherwise.

So that it isn't only the issue of documents being openly available, but one of:

• the form which this availability takes

• the relationship between the time available to most organizational participants for organizational activities and their ability to read and understand the documents in such time.

• the knowledge base participants have on average, and its relationships to documents

It is also crucial, like in software development, where developers have to communicate to users continuously and form early stages, that documents are organized and compiled for the participants, and not by some predefined criteria only (Software is just a document with functionality, a document that does something).

Time and Knowledge

If documents aren't made available and organized with the criteria for assesment being available time and knowledge of members/participants, then those documents have been closed down for members/participants whose time and knowledge do not allow them to read and asses given documents.

comments from Steve Cisler (via Patrice Riemens)

In Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels, the author charts the struggle by early Christian bishops to settle on a common knowledge base--the four gospels that are the core of the New Testament and the diatribes against the other groups who based their faith/religion on other gospels that allowed much more diversity and personal revelation instead of a more centralized authority.

In organizing knowledge/information for a group (affinity, corporate, geographic, linguistic, age) most librarians try to use criteria that facilitates exchange of such info on a global basis. That's why librarians have had compatible, if arcane, databases since the early 1970s for catalog records. And the cataloging--an art in itself--is meant to be as descriptive as possible to help the user decide if it might be what he needs. To the outsider it may seem excessive, so frequently a librarian may serve as an intermediary for those people who don't have the time or experience to make sense of the guides, roadmaps, catalogs of material in a local, regional or global collection. The ideal is for the tools to be used without the help of the librarians, but that does not always happen. The most brilliant professor I had at the university taught in five departments but had to have help using the catalog at Northwestern (a pioneer in online catalogs).

As the world of Internet users grows people are asking for help much less from the public librarians in the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere and in other kinds of libraries). However, their skills are pretty basic. At Google the public is still making very simple searches and not taking advantage of the power of their search engine. So a librarian needs to realize this and try to make the user interface good enough to meet the needs of people who may not ask for help. In the open-org site, if the librarian has a channel for email or real time communication open to the members, in case they don't find what they are looking for, that can lead to more satisfaction.

Many libraries have short surveys to ask if people found what they were looking for, and that can help in various ways: user satisfaction with the system ("they care enough about me to ask!") with improving the design of the site and with the tasks of the librarian. In the Bay Area (and some other places) libraries have a section called "Q&A Cafe" which is a real time reference/information service and it uses some software written for company support departments. For instance, I went online at 6 in the morning and got a librarian 3 time zones away because the California librarians were not working yet. I think the whole service was exciting to some, but to the librarians working this it was not very satisfactory. And it's expensive during a time when there are lots of budget cuts.

(From Steve Cisler, via postal mail)

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