INLS
180 Day 22 Notes
March
28, 2002
Recommender
systems. Reactions?
Big Points
The
messenger matters (value judgments influenced by who delivers; presentation
matters)
Self-interest
drives behavior
Communication
and social interaction are crucial for reference librarians
Reference
is a human service (as such, it must be rooted in psychology and sociology)
Questions
Many bothered by the notion that
self-interest drives communication/interaction (and all human behavior)
Many offered interpretations of self
interest that were not linked to personal gain and negative connotations
Many bothered by the 55% accuracy
Does the public expect librarians to
accept lower wages because they get intangible rewards from helping others? [a
twist on self interest]
How do we improve success rate of
reference librarians? Should we
evaluate the questions as part of our ratings?
What about the environment (e.g., how busy the library is)?
How do reference librarians know
when they really have helped (been successful)?
Why is there so much attention to
putting human approaches to automation?
If politeness and courtesy are so
important, why don’t we have workshops/courses?
In a restaurant, bad food but great
service, do you tip? Are you happy?
What about libraries?
Ackerman, M. & Malone. T.
Answer Garden: A tool for growing organizational memory. Proceedings of
ACM COIS (Cambridge, MA April, 1990). P 31-39. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ackerman/pub/90b03/cois90.final.pdf
(Helen Dunn)
Gasaway, L. (1998). Copyright,
the Internet and other legal issues (JASIST online) (Laura Bell)
Samuelson, P. (2001). Toward a new politics of intellectual property (ACM DL)
(Anne Bauers)
3. One-minute
paper
What was the big point you
learned in class today?
What is the main, unanswered
question you leave class with today?