Nowadays libraries are not what they apparently used to be. At the Sharefair in Rome last month a have been in a session about the future of the agricultural library. Well, ‘the’ library is a bit too deep for me, so I took the easy way and talked about the library that I know, at Wageningen UR where the research institutes do not have brick-and-mortar libraries any more, and the university soon only one, that is heavily used by MSc students. Maybe this is what will happen at other places as well, I tried to argue. I do not think it went down very well with others, because the example is from a very specific environment, not to be compared to a global network of research institutes (CGIAR) , smaller (WFP) or larger UN organizations that concentrate policy rather than research or education, smaller NGO’s let alone libraries in remote rural areas. Anyway, I do not know where it is all going.

Originally libraries were places where knowledge on paper is ordered and used. They have been discussing (and worrying) about their future since the first electronic information products on diskette or CD-ROM were introduced. In fact I was a bit disappointed last month to see that we did not get a bit further with this discussion.

Brick-and-mortar libraries will disappear in working environments where paper becomes less important, and much as we may regret it, I do not see much future for brick-and-mortar libraries in smaller research institutes or university departments, extension services, some schools, or smaller NGO’s. But I am worried if this is initiated by accountants. For them it must be difficult to assess if they are throwing away essential functions for an organization. To mention some of the hazards:

• In some environments it may be possible to ignore information that is not available in an electronic form, but in other environments information from before that date (roughly the late nineties) is indispensable or at least relevant. At least what I can say is, that electronic backfiles of scientific journals are in high demand. There the choice is probably: keep the brick-and-mortar library going (but it may be a frustrating job to work in such a library) or digitize where possible older material.
• Libraries are organizations that should have the skills to categorize material and organize consistent workflows for data collection. Better not throw away these skills if an organization wants to maintain for example a project information system. At was common to say amongst information management people that project information systems are something to stay away from: it is almost impossible to make them complete and keep some continuity. One could consider making the IT department responsible, they may be inclined to hope that technology will do the trick. Or the research policy department, but often their heads are in higher policy spheres.
• Especially fee-based scientific journals might very well be around for some time still. If anybody would have told me ten years ago that so much would stay the same in that area, both their form and their business model, I would not have believed it. Anyway, institutions that need access to these journals will have to balance their needs and what they can afford to pay. Traditionally libraries did that. And whatever you want to call this process in the future, it needs to be done
• One of the keywords that I wrote down is custodianship. Not a sexy word, it makes libraries sound dusty. But if we want to keep a joint memory for important things, somebody will have to take care. This is about keeping things accessible in the longer term. Their conservatism sometimes makes librarians people who are difficult to deal with. But their weak point is also a strong point. DFID for example took responsibility to keep its research outputs accessible, and they went to an organization with roots in librarianship, CABI, to do the job.

Much of this is about keeping the skill-base of librarians rather the organizations themselves. And that is what really worries my: who is going to work in libraries? Not so long ago I discouraged somebody that I really love to work with to choose for a career as an information manager. She had worked with web-based full-text systems only, so nothing dusty there. But librarianship, even electronic librarianship, seems to be a difficult path to choose for young people. What we can do at least is advocate how important the skill-set is for organizations.

In the Netherlands the university librarian of the University of Leiden raised the question (I am simplifying now) whether it would not be better to train people who come from other disciplines than to give people a specialized library education these days.

In Lindsey Davis book one of the candidates for the librarianship of the library of Alexandria was somebody who was a trained librarian rather than a scholar in another subject.

Oops, I am afraid he turned out to be a murderer (or not?) I am sure this is not an omen.

]]> http://hugobes.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/libraries/feed/ 5 hugobes http://hugobes.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/knowledge-and-language/ http://hugobes.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/knowledge-and-language/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:47:57 +0000 hugobes http://hugobes.wordpress.com/?p=22 Continue reading →]]>

One of the eight readers of my blog post on “ knowledge” asked what objections are against the  concepts of tacit and explicit knowledge, or knowledge versus information. It seems to be the central idea on which the KM/KS movement is based. Again, I have not read much of the original sources, so in fact I am reacting to the simple popular versions.

The central assumption seems to be that the nature of knowledge changes when it is transformed in any form of language, and somehow it becomes “ lesser”. In this context language can be anything, I assume, it can be written language, spoken language, graphics or body language (I have the impression that some do not include spoken language or body language as “explicit knowledge” or “ information” , but I can not see a reason for an exception).

Literally (and quantitatively) this is certainly true. We can not possibly write down all that we have in our heads, and if some of us would succeed to do so, it would be still more impossible to read it all. But some advocates of these ideas seem to implicate that there is also a qualitative change.

One of the problems I have with the tacit/explicit/knowledge/information idea that it only through language that we know what goes on in our fellow beings. And that is why we think that only human beings have knowledge: we can share a language with them Our barking is pathetic, our meowing not much better, and our twittering is an offence to any nightingale or even blackbird. But I an certain my dog has knowledge (often food-related)

But the main problem with the idea is, that if I try to find any piece of knowledge in my head, it immediately transforms in language, hence explicit knowledge or information. I have tried for some time to capture a thought before it transformed into language, but it did not work of course. And to validate what is in my head I use information, and even believe this explicit knowledge rather than what is in my head. For example: where was Hugo when he heard that John Kennedy had died? I remember that I came back from the annual school-trip, and that our parents told us. I even remember that it was a mild spring evening. According to Wikipedia Kennedy was murdered November 22, 1963, no mild spring evenings in the Netherlands that time of the year, and a bad time for annual school trips as the weather often leaves to be desired. What do I believe? Do I trust what is in my head? No, I believe Wikipedia.

But then, I spent my life in academia, so maybe i have become queer  by that experience. Some years ago I had a carpenter as a neighbour (which is great one is as left-handed as me) Together with his brother he could build whatever he wanted without looking at a paper. But he confirmed that he saw the design in his head, if things would get more complicated they would use paper but for simple things there was no need. But what they had in their head was graphic language.

So again, I do not believe the K in KM/KS is very meaningful, but then, who cares? In the beginning of the century there were consultations on agricultural information management, and they were rather dull if one managed not to get annoyed. Information as a concept felt tired. The Knowledge Sharefair was a lively event, full of energy. So if the word “ knowledge” is a spell that does that trick, it is a good thing.

One of the threats for the KM/KS movement is over-promising.

I was trained by people who were formed by the first “ information revolution”. The same John Kennedy decided to invest in Information. It was a belated reaction to the “Sputnik” shock when the USA was surprised that the soviets launched a satellite while they could have known, as the soviets published about their research openly.

Information advocates in those yours could go round for years telling the same story about the importance of information. Richard Lesk describes in “The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval” (http://www.ifla.org/VI/5/op/udtop5/udtop5.htm ) about the process of over-selling.

I fear that the KM/KS movement is also in danger of over-selling. All this knowledge sharing about knowledge sharing sometimes makes me think of the early years of the Internet. In the late eighties and early nineties one could only find there solutiosn to problems that one would not have if one did not connect to the Internet. System manager’s stuff like TCP/IP stacks and Gopher servers for the VAX/VMS operating system. I hope that the KM/KS movement will not talk about tacit and explicit, but about real things. People rather than knowledge.

]]> http://hugobes.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/knowledge-and-language/feed/ 0 hugobes http://hugobes.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/is-knowledge-knowledge/ http://hugobes.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/is-knowledge-knowledge/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:12:44 +0000 hugobes http://hugobes.wordpress.com/?p=17 Continue reading →]]> Today I have been checking the (draft) program of an event next week, the Sharefair ( http://www.sharefair.net) It appears I willgo there in the end, so I wanted to know where I will be going. It is a Fair, so there should be a variety of things on offer, but I had some difficulty finding a common thread. The program looks like a kaleidoscope with pieces like: ‘capturing indigenous knowledge’, ‘internal communication in organizations’, ‘building networks’ or ‘culture and gender issues ‘. It seems as if the organizers are struggling as well, but fortunately they do an effort to categorize the different events and presentations in categories like “K for influence” , “K stores” , “K for my-projects” etcetera. “K” of course stands for “knowledge”. “Knowledge”, it seems to be these days a bit like Bob Dylan or Tolkien. Some are into it, and others are not. And some can not make up their minds. Like me.

I came across the notion “knowledge” twice in my working life, and they meant entirely different things.

The first time was in the mid-nineties when there were many expectations of “knowledge based information systems”. Knowledge was meant here as domain specific knowledge that would have to be laid down in such a way that it could be processed by a computer. Computer systems would then be able to make decisions that normally would be made by domain experts. There were even specific EU Framework calls to develop knowledge-based applications such as expert systems. I was excited when I could buy interpreters to run specialized programming languages like Prolog or LISP on my MS/DOS computer. It provided us with an inference engine and all we had to do is formulate rules to base the inference on.

In the end I hardly used my Prolog and I think I ran into the same problems as everybody else. The number of rules that one has to lay down to let the system calculate the right decisions for complex tasks (like “how to prepare breakfast”) is enormous. ON top of that it is not easy to formulate them unambiguously. And even then the results do not always make sense. To explain the problem: take two clauses: “If A then B” and “If B then C” and obviously an inference engine has to conclude: “If A then C”. I believe that it is called the first or second law of inference.

But if one fills in real life statements things get a bit complex:

It is easy to see why the first “syllogism” works: it only contains statements that are always true independent of any context. But if we can only use statements that are true in any context, life is a bit bleak if we want to develop systems If things are true in some contexts and not in others, things get more tricky like in the second syllogism (where even all statements pertain to John ……). Aristotle already started with these syllogisms and we have not really got much further since.

When it appeared to be more work than expected for human beings to ‘construct knowledge’ the discussion moved to “ intelligent agents” that would collect their rules automatically while crawling cyberspace. I wonder what happened to them, maybe they can not find the way back, or like it better out there.

The semantic web has since then resulted in new methods of encoding rules in an interchangeable way (RDF and OWL) But in my view the main challenge is not encoding but how to construct rules that make sense in different environments……

After a few years ‘knowledge based information systems’ had lost much of their attraction. But that was all right as in the aftermath the World Wide Web really took off, so everybody was toobusy exploring the new opportunities to mourn about these lost promises from the past.

Lateron things got still better when XML was invented to allow data exchange between different databases. An initiative was created to investigate these opportunities for the development sector, IDML (International Development Markup Language (IDML). As one of the results the project databases of different donors could be amalgated into AIDA. http://aida.developmentgateway.org/index.do As you can see in the URL it is part of the development gateway that was initiated by the Worldbank and that did not go down well with everybody, especially antiglobalists. At the time there ware rumours that Gates Foundation would provide the Bank with 50 million dollar “to take over the Internet”. (50 million would not have brought one very far even in those days, the Internet is worth quite a bit more today I would guess, and in the end the 50 million did not materialize). But indeed there was quite some opposition to the Development Gateway. At some point there was an initiative to create an independent “Open Development Consortium” as an alternative . It did not work out, and that was at least partly the result of fresh confusion about “ knowledge” . Somehow there were expectations from two different groups that this would be their platform. On the one hand there were the information &data people, who expected this would be the home for exchange. On the other hand there was a new group of players who wanted to introduce “knowledge management” in the development sector. The discussion between the two groups did not work out. Probably for many reasons, but for me the discussion became unpleasant when it appeared impossible to speak from an information management. The argument as far as I understood it was that we should first sortout the knowledge perspective on a global scale. That ruled me out, I have spent most of my working life in formation services. It kept me away from “knowledge” for some years. Which is a mistake of course. My first encounter with knowledge management / sharing was a bit unfortunate. But KM/KS advocates are no doubt as diverse as any other group of people. Anyway, it is interesting to compare KM/KS advocates with the “knowledge engineers” from the expert systems rea:

• The KM/KS advocates are certainly not all of them technophiles (and knowledge engineers certainly are…)
• The KM/KS advocates are are primarily interested in social processes , while the knowledge engineers were inclined to see possible application of their product in real life as a justification rather than as a goal.
• The knowledge engineers tried to break down reality into a collection of standardized statements. KM/KS advocates are inclusive thinkers, and usually allergic to any form of reductionism.
• KM/KS advocates are quite good at making themselves heard, and as they are often in communication departments etcetera in fact that is what they are supposed to be good at.

It seems as if both groups have the word “knowledge” in common but little else. They use it with completely different meanings. The knowledge engineers at least tried to give it a clear meaning. They ran into problems but they tried …… KM/KS advocates are very explicit about what knowledge is not, but a bit vague about what it is. Knowledge is not information nor is it data. If I understand things well knowledge is in people’s heads. As soon as it is transformed in any kind of language it becomes information. Sometimes “tacit knowledge” is used for what is in people’s head and “explicit knowledge” is what “that has been or can be articulated, codified, and stored in certain media” (so I would venture to call it “information”).

Things get a bit confusing when people describe (as Wikipedia does) tacit knowledge as a “form of knowledge that is apparently wholly or partly inexplicable”. (It seems that Michael Polanyi who introduced ‘tacit’ spoke about ‘knowing’ instead of ‘kowledge’. Some find that significant. To me it is a bit a game of words. Can one know without having knowledge?)

Does it matter that the notion “knowledge” in KM/KS is a bit up in the air? Does it affect what people do in practice? I have to admit that that KM/KS initiatives can bring people together, involve them and make them come up with new ideas. Several of the techniques are probably older than the notion KM/KS. I have been in events when I was at university where people did the same ice-breakers etc. as they do today. It was called “applied extension science” then. Nothing wrong with using what works. But why speak of ‘ knowledge’ instead of ‘people’, as they used to when I was young? . “ Knowledge” is an abstract construct. What does it add? Hum, “people management” and “people sharing” somehow do not sound right.

Well at least these techniques, like chat shows and fishbowls, make less boring meetings. And KM/KS initiatives make an effective use of web 2.0 services. (But do we need the notion “ knowledge for that? Most users of Web 2.0 services just use them, they’re free. Wonder how long that will last in a recession)

So what if the last word has not yet been said about the philosophical background?

Somehow I have a feeling that there is an issue here, and it may limit the applicability of KM/KS (I have not even read a tiny fraction of what has been written on KM/KS so it is not more than a feeling). If it is unclear what knowledge is, it is equally unclear what is not knowledge. As I said KM/KS efforts raise a lot of issues and a lot of ideas. Reports of events often contain long lists of bullet points. . I have been in a number of meetings where first the scene was set, then people split up in smaller groups to write down ideas on sticky notes and stick them on a board. The notes would then be categorized, and end up in the report as bullet points. There was no time to discuss them in detail, no time to prioritize, select the better ones and throw away others. If everything is knowledge it is hard to make choices. It is of course hard to exclude things of you want to be inclusive.

One of the missing pieces in the kaleidoscope of subjects at the Sharefair is “hard science”. There is a long standing tradition of knowledge sharing in that area, but it is based on things like peer review, journals with high rejection rates for articles, etc. The general assumption seems to be, that some knowledges are definitely better than others. There is a sentiment in the KM/KS community that scientists should look for new ways to communicate their findings and not restrict themselves to the established peer-to-peer channels. That being said it I think it is too easy to ignore the good sides of the scientific grading system. Many scientists can not ignore it if they want to stay in business. “ Peer review” does not necessarily imply that a publication is not open access. Science has progressed on the basis of disagreement: “I do not believe what you say and will do an experiment to prove that it is not true”. Admittedly it is not the only thing that drives science, such as the needs and participation of potential beneficiaries. .

Finally there is another, more personal reason, why I am not fully satisfied just saying that “knowledge is what is in people’s head”. There are a lot of things in my head that are probably not considered as “knowledge”: my emotions, loves, envies, passion, grieves and all those other “naughty bits”. With all that happy knowledge sharing there seems to be no place for those naughty bits. But they want to get out every now and again……..