Thursday, August 1, 2013

Dervin's 10 Myths of Information Seeking

This was the most interesting part of this lecture, to me.  It reminded me of the principle that I learned in Library Management about creating a "Stop Doing" list.  As a production-oriented person, evaluating the things that I do on a daily basis and pruning some of them out was very novel, and even a little scary.  But when I applied this principle, and made my own "Stop Doing" list, I was amazed at how much extra time I had left each day to do more important things, and I was also surprised that there wasn't (much) backlash.   Either no none noticed, or it wasn't important to them.

I'm not talking about choosing between "bad" activities and "good" activities; that's on a different level of morality.  I'm talking about consciously choosing activities that are of equal goodness, but are not adding to one's daily satisfaction; one's daily quality of life; and deciding to stop doing them.  Kind of like weeding out the library's collection - the book may be a great book, but it's old, and there's a copy available in the library's on-line resources, and no one has checked the physical book out for five years. It can go.

So the presentation of Information Seeking Myths fell right into my mental category of "things that turn my thinking upside down, which might be really useful".  I especially was intrigued by #5 "There is relevant information for every need"; and #7 "It is always possible to make information available or accessible." In the ideal world, perhaps these would not be myths; but Dervin is right: sometimes there just isn't an answer, and you can't always make all information available and accessible.

I think what these myths do is allow us, as future librarians, to recognize that we don't have to feel responsible if, occasionally, we run into situations where the ten myths are proven to be true.  And that's OK.

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