Week 11: Producing knowledge
Gloria J. Leckie, Karen E. Pettigrew, and Christian Sylvain: “Modeling the Information Seeking of Professionals…”
I think this article was a well-intended attempt to synthesize the current research on various professional groups into a comprehensive model, but ‘professionals’ is too generic a term and too general a group to be a cohesive sample. Even the definition of profession that the authors provide reflects this general sense: “those service-oriented occupations having a theoretical knowledge base, requiring extensive formal postsecondary education, having a self-governing association, and adhering to internally developed codes of ethics or other statements of principle” (162). In order to devise a model, these common features must be extracted, but I think this approach underestimates all the nuances of specific professional contextual demands by glossing over them. While this model may be a good starting point in helping professionals, it’s not very useful for helping a specific professional who would require information and assistance unique to their situation.
However, I did find their break down of the professional’s information need as dependent on either their work role or task interesting. Previously I wouldn’t have been able to see a distinction. Most professionals are primarily identified by their work role I would say, because this is the image that they project out into the public, which formulates a conception of what that professional does based on their projected image. I never would have considered the individual tasks the professional must accomplish behind the scenes as affecting their information seeking or even their information needs, although now it seems quite obvious. To label a professional merely by their title, and consequently to allow this label to dictate their information needs, certainly overlooks all of their distinct responsibilities. However, it is these responsibilities that are specific to a professional’s designated field (context) that are necessary to be aware of in assisting their information search and that are lost in the model created by the authors.
John Willinsky: “Opening” and “Cooperative”
From this article, I learned that researchers pay publishers to publish their research. I had no idea this was the case. I assumed just the opposite was true; publishers compete for the right to publish new research, and thus collecting all the benefits from its success and reputation in that field. The author cites one journal, the Springer journal, as allowing the contributing authors to make their articles available through open access for a fee of $3000 (5). Maybe my concept of money and costs is still skewed, as I am a student and once again living on a meager income and budget, but that seems like a ridiculous amount to require from an author. Is that to say that the researcher must then either pay out of pocket, force the university and thus students like me to shoulder the publishing cost, or allocate research/grant money in order to allow those paying into the system, through tuition or taxes, to access the article? What does the publisher charge to be published in the traditional, printed journal? It all seems very sneaky to me; putting a hefty price tag on ‘free, open access’ can easily be construed as a significant disincentive to make more research results available to a wider range of people and institutions.
Not too long ago, I was having a conversation with a friend, who works in a competitive online information field but is not connected to developing research results because of the restricted access of academic journals. As we were talking about what an exorbitant amount of money universities must pay for annual ‘subscriptions’ and database access to these journals for their faculty and students, he asked me “why wouldn’t you make more of that information available for less?” Maybe because experts in their field would fear the common joe walking into their office with educated questions, making them liable for the information they have published and accountable for further information as demanded by a much wider range of people, not just other experts in their field who formerly would have been the likely reader of the article. Also, it would level the playing field so to speak, as the Alliance for Taxpayer Access claims (1-2), for those in smaller, less wealthy institutions who cannot keep pace with the larger universities, for example. I like the author’s idea of a researching, publishing, consuming cooperative; at the very least, it represents the multitude of non-traditional ideas yet to be discovered.
I think this article was a well-intended attempt to synthesize the current research on various professional groups into a comprehensive model, but ‘professionals’ is too generic a term and too general a group to be a cohesive sample. Even the definition of profession that the authors provide reflects this general sense: “those service-oriented occupations having a theoretical knowledge base, requiring extensive formal postsecondary education, having a self-governing association, and adhering to internally developed codes of ethics or other statements of principle” (162). In order to devise a model, these common features must be extracted, but I think this approach underestimates all the nuances of specific professional contextual demands by glossing over them. While this model may be a good starting point in helping professionals, it’s not very useful for helping a specific professional who would require information and assistance unique to their situation.
However, I did find their break down of the professional’s information need as dependent on either their work role or task interesting. Previously I wouldn’t have been able to see a distinction. Most professionals are primarily identified by their work role I would say, because this is the image that they project out into the public, which formulates a conception of what that professional does based on their projected image. I never would have considered the individual tasks the professional must accomplish behind the scenes as affecting their information seeking or even their information needs, although now it seems quite obvious. To label a professional merely by their title, and consequently to allow this label to dictate their information needs, certainly overlooks all of their distinct responsibilities. However, it is these responsibilities that are specific to a professional’s designated field (context) that are necessary to be aware of in assisting their information search and that are lost in the model created by the authors.
John Willinsky: “Opening” and “Cooperative”
From this article, I learned that researchers pay publishers to publish their research. I had no idea this was the case. I assumed just the opposite was true; publishers compete for the right to publish new research, and thus collecting all the benefits from its success and reputation in that field. The author cites one journal, the Springer journal, as allowing the contributing authors to make their articles available through open access for a fee of $3000 (5). Maybe my concept of money and costs is still skewed, as I am a student and once again living on a meager income and budget, but that seems like a ridiculous amount to require from an author. Is that to say that the researcher must then either pay out of pocket, force the university and thus students like me to shoulder the publishing cost, or allocate research/grant money in order to allow those paying into the system, through tuition or taxes, to access the article? What does the publisher charge to be published in the traditional, printed journal? It all seems very sneaky to me; putting a hefty price tag on ‘free, open access’ can easily be construed as a significant disincentive to make more research results available to a wider range of people and institutions.
Not too long ago, I was having a conversation with a friend, who works in a competitive online information field but is not connected to developing research results because of the restricted access of academic journals. As we were talking about what an exorbitant amount of money universities must pay for annual ‘subscriptions’ and database access to these journals for their faculty and students, he asked me “why wouldn’t you make more of that information available for less?” Maybe because experts in their field would fear the common joe walking into their office with educated questions, making them liable for the information they have published and accountable for further information as demanded by a much wider range of people, not just other experts in their field who formerly would have been the likely reader of the article. Also, it would level the playing field so to speak, as the Alliance for Taxpayer Access claims (1-2), for those in smaller, less wealthy institutions who cannot keep pace with the larger universities, for example. I like the author’s idea of a researching, publishing, consuming cooperative; at the very least, it represents the multitude of non-traditional ideas yet to be discovered.
posted by lwinkle at 7:21 AM
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