Readings 11/13

Modeling the Information Seeking of Professionals by Leckie, Pettigrew and Sylvain

A comprehensive examination of three different professions sheds light on the information seeking behavior of professionals as a whole. Through an extensive examination of previous literature (Ninety sources in their bibliography), Leckie et al. conduct a sort of meta-analysis and try to find some similarities. Following their description of the literature they propose a model, a very general one at that. Every once in a while models of this nature are helpful but in most cases I don’t see the usefulness of them. This model, because of its scope is terribly general. They say themselves that there is a great deal more nuances that go into each part of it such as “roles” or “tasks,” things that need to be taken on an case by case basis. This model can be applied to any number of situations but to actually understand them, one will have to examine the individual situation in depth anyway. The model doesn’t seem as useful as they make it out to be.

The Access Principle (Chapters 1 and 6) by John Willinsky

These chapters address the idea of open access of materials amongst the scholarly community. The principle is that scholars, students and all people in the academic community should have free and equal access to these materials in order to foster an environment of collaboration. Of course this would be a great thing, and good for the academic community but there are a number of problems. Foremost of these is the publishing industry. In order to keep journals running and viable subscription fees need to be charged. We are given some examples of self-sustaining journals and databases but there are still many that charge for access. Another interesting point that Willinsky makes is his idea based on Aristotle’s quote, “All humankind by nature desires to know.” This idea Willinsky proposes is that because of this it should be a human right to know. In our constitution or the Bill of Rights there is nothing about the right to know, but perhaps it should be added. The right to know, seems as basic as life liberty or the pursuit of happiness (with out getting into too many epistemological hang ups).