Inclusive and exclusive disciplines

This week we read an interesting article about building a communication journal collection in a discipline that is at odds with itself as to what actually constitutes its boundaries.  In "The Communication Journal Collection," author Dawn Popoff explains the complication surrounding defining the new academic discipline of communication.  In many ways these difficulties might be seen of having arisen during the 1940's when the field seemed to split in two directions, with one remaining a field of the humanities and another defining itself as a more scientific approach to communication (2006, pp. 69-70).  In other ways, the field is split due to disputes between whether the field should be inclusive, that is, with equal interest in how communication works in many interdisciplinary fields such as education and business advertising; or whether communication should define itself under a more exclusive model that focuses only on articles written by those in the communications field, or at least from the perspective of  communication theories (pp. 72-3).

From a standpoint of a communication subject librarian, the mindset of a particular institution's faculty members could have a significant effect on the way in which librarians select communication's journals, as well as the way in which they offer assistance to students.  Popoff points to three lists of communication journals by large institutions, one by Mammoth University, one by the Social Science Citation Index, and the Iowa Guide, and points out that only one of the three (the Iowa Guide) is an inclusive list. Further, Popoff points out that even among the two exclusive lists, the two lists offer a surprisingly small amount of agreement between what journals actually fit the criteria as an exclusive journal (pp. 74).

If the generators of these lists disagree between the parameters that define their view of exclusive communication journals, then there is reasonable to suspect that there is likely a high degree of disagreement between different faculty and different departments, as well. Additionally, if the professors and researchers have this much disagreement about their own field, then I can imagine that it would be very difficult for a student to learn how to navigate this complicated terrain in order to find resources that their different professors would agree fall within their own framework of acceptable communication research.

Popoff attributes this disagreement to the fact that the discipline is still young and has not fully matured (pp. 76), and encourages librarians to follow the debate closely in order to know developing trends in communication research. Papoff also suggests that, "even those who represent departments that espouse an exclusive interpretation of journals must remember that communication researchers many want to review the literature of related disciplines even if they do not consider it true communication research" (pp. 77).

As we have seen in past weeks, these problems are not necessarily unique to the communication field of study. Many other fields have branched off into sub-fields. Some of these sub-fields have remained more identifiable as elements of the humanities by remaining keenly interested in classic works in their discipline, while others have attempted to establish a more modern and scientifically rigorous approach to their studies.  Many of these issues are rather political in their origins and have a lot to do with acquiring grants, resources, and the interest of attracting students by remaining relevant in an increasingly technical and scientific age.  No matter what the cause, though, librarians in these fields have the difficulty of remaining flexible and highly knowledgeable to both the inclusive and exclusive camps in their respective fields.

In the end, it is not really up to the librarian to settle (or even necessarily to take a stance on) the disagreement between inclusive and exclusive journals in communication.  A reference librarian in this field would probably be better off to remain as neutral as possible and as open to different theories communication as possible.  Retaining a flexible mindset will likely result in a more diversified collection (budget allowing), that is likely to benefit a wide range of research and disciplines.  It is important, however, for the librarian to have a good relationship with the faculty in order to properly instruct students on obtaining the proper research materials.


Popoff, D., (2006). The communication journal collection. Collection Management ent, 30(3). pp. 67-85

More on Subject Headings and Information Literacy

Our reading this week began with the essay, Information Literacy: the Partnership of Sociology Faculty and Social Science Librarians (Caravello, Kain, Kuchi, Macicak, & Weiss, 2008). This essay introduces the reader to information literacy as it applies to the sociology student, and the ways in which faculty and librarians can work together to ensure that these information literacy requirements are being met by the sociology curriculum.

Like other essays on the topic of information literacy, we learn that what is meant by IL is the ability of individuals to identify their information need, access the relevant information, critically evaluate the information, digest and incorporate the information in order to perform some specific task, and to use this information ethically and legally (pp. 9).   A sociology student's definition of IL gets more specific to their research with the addition of understanding the relationship of social structures and information.  This involves understanding social inequalities, access to technology, and the social structures that are generally responsible for the creation and dissemination of information. The reference librarian, in the field of sociology, should have an understanding of these needs and work with faculty to ensure that students are aware of these aspects of IL.

But, the library is made up of more than just liaisons, reference desks and reference librarians.  Before anyone can access a resource, it first needs cataloged so that that resource is discoverable and accessible to students.  The way in which this is accomplished will effect access to the resource and can make the difference between a resource being missed and a resource being found.

While exploring the web site of the ANSS (Anthropology and Sociology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries) I was surprised to find the way in which the ANSS addresses the problem of accessibility of library resources for sociology.  Like any other field in academia, sociology is not a static field.  Rather, it is constantly in flux. New knowledge is constantly being added. New knowledge means new theories, new research fields, new research questions, and new terminology.  In terms of access, this means that subject headings are constantly being added in order to ensure that resources are findable using up-to-date terminology.

University libraries mostly use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in order to describe the subject of a resource. Using this kind of controlled vocabulary is a way of ensuring consistency and formality to subject analysis, and gains the benefit of uniformity and predictability for the end-user. The LCSH is not a static set of subject headings, rather, it, like knowledge itself, is constantly in flux. They update in order to keep up with the changing nature of resources, experimentation, research, and discovery.  By keeping up to date subject headings, the LCSH remains relevant, and catalogers are given the tools they need to describe new resources.

But how is a cataloger suppose to keep up with a constantly changing database of subject headings that cover virtually all areas of knowledge that appear in resources from monographs to music and movies?  The answer that the ANSS has adopted on their website is to include a section on New Subject headings (http://anssacrl.wordpress.com/publications/new-subject-headings/). It is here that a catalog librarian can keep updated on what new subject headings were added to the LCSH in the fields of sociology and anthropology in order to describe new resources (or even update existing records of old resources) so that they are current as to how researchers will look for the resource.

This list benefits researchers, students, and reference librarians as much as it benefits catalog librarians. By checking the list of new subject headings, any researcher can have an idea of what new subject terms she or he may use while conducting a search.  Even by casually scanning the list, a researcher might be inspired to look into a given new heading to see if their library has any items on the subject.

Out of my own interest, I decided to test some of the new subject headings from the list on KentLink to see if Kent State University has yet made use of  any of these new headings. In a very non-scientific way, I chose some subject headings at random and ran a subject search in KentLink

2014 headings:
Jewish Morning Customs - None
Melodrama, Polish - None
Ethiopian American Art - None
Cell phone users - None.

2010 headings:
Aleut literature - none
Pets and older people - none
College student parents - none
Coming of age - 16

2007 headings:
Custodial parents - 1
Transgender prisoners - 1
Social gerontology - 3
Punk culture and art - 2
First responders - 47


This raises some interesting research questions:

• How long does it take a new subject heading to go from being added to LCSH to being widely used?
• How does attention in media effect the usage of a subject heading?

Caravello, P. S., & Kain, E. L., & Kuchi, T., & Macicak, S., & Weiss, G. L. (2008). Information literacy: the partnership of sociology faculty and social science librarians. Teaching Sociology (36). pages 8-16.

Embedded academic librarians

Is the future of educating health professionals, even doctors in advanced fields, intricately linked to the future of librarians in academics? Before this week’s course, I would not have thought that a librarian would be a very active role in the life learning educational practice of post-graduate medical students on their way to becoming world-class neurosurgeons, however, this week’s focus on the more active role in which a librarian can take in a university’s educational program has given me reasons to re-think the role of librarian in the academic setting.

As an undergraduate at Slippery Rock University, the library was a rather under-utilized resource for myself and many other students. It did serve as a hub for social interaction and one place on campus for liberal arts majors to refill on caffeine, however, the actual intellectual resources were not very well advertised or made explicitly known.  I did have a tendency to roam the stacks, usually on full out zombie-mode, mindlessly pursuing some brain-food in the philosophy sections, but I seldom appreciated the opportunity to gain a more thorough understanding of information literacy that the library provided.

In terms of outreach programs at the university, there was only one class on advanced research in which research habits were even discussed to any great detail. Sadly, this class was an upper-level class and was typically taken as part of the last semester course load.  Reflecting on the lessons from this module, I would strongly recommend that class be made mandatory for all freshmen.  This was the only class in which a librarian from the Slippery Rock University Library would actually address students. However, rather than giving a more individual approach to how librarians can teach better search strategies, and how those strategies can have an enormous impact on research outcomes, the librarian instead addressed the class at large, giving a brief history of information literacy in the time of computers. It was a nice attempt at getting students to think about searching strategies and database technology in research, but it did not offer practical solutions or a chance for students to gain any personal understanding of the advantageous and limits of these technologies.

Meanwhile, the Australian School of Advanced Medicine (ASAM) has recently spent a great deal of effort to address the issue of information literacy in post-graduate medical study.  ASAM offers a cutting edge program in terms of evidence based medicine that is truly based on actual patient care and outcomes.  An essay examining the role of the librarian in the program of ASAM describes ASAM’s goal as being one designed to effectively practice evidence-based medicine and to create lifelong learners by demonstrating effective independent research, based on clinical practice, that is conducted in a team based environment (Simons, Morgan, & Davidson, 2012, pp. 291).

Access to evidence-based literature is considered an absolute key to competency goals in the curriculum at ASAM, as described by the authors “gaining access to, and making use of, this literature is where information literacy becomes an important skill for learners to master” (2012, pp. 291).  After it was discovered that many of the scholars at ASAM lacked the necessary information literacy skills to show competence in this area of evidence based learning, it became a priority to incorporate librarians in developing an efficient model to improve scholar awareness and mastery of medical databases and searching the required literature.

Initial steps taken to educate scholars on information literacy included, journal meetings conducted in small groups with experts present, short personalized training sessions with librarians, and a variety of different tools on the library web site that served as tutorials for using different databases (pp. 292).  When these steps were found to be insufficient addressing specific concerns that the school had, ASAM took the steps to involve librarians more closely in the educational process.   Neurosurgeons began to set up evidence based surgery meetings with groups of scholars and advanced scholars that aimed at the scholars delivering presentations where they would discuss patient history, relevant pathology, and a literature search that must lead to a clinical conclusion based on available evidence (pp. 292-3).  University librarians were utilized in order to create performance elements in which to evaluate the development of search strategies from the start of the process to the end, including ways in which the scholar used the available functionality of the databases in order to refine the search strategy, and the effectiveness of using MeSH terminology in conjunction with keywords specific to the patient (pp. 292).

In addition to helping to develop the competency criteria for this part of scholarship, the scholar would also be required to meet with the librarian throughout the process in order to develop an understanding of information literacy.  This process was repeated until the scholar showed full competency in information literacy that “went beyond merely performing the steps” (pp. 293; 295).

If this concept of embedded librarians can be utilized to educate post-graduate advanced medical students, then there is no reason to believe that it could not be utilized in any other area of academics.  The article on embedded librarians in Capella University also makes a strong argument for the advantages of having a more integrated and involved librarian in the academic setting.  In their research, Erika Bennett and Jennie Simning (2010), found that an increased presence of a librarian early on in the student’s undergraduate work actually increases the number of reference questions received by the library (2010, pp 445-6).  Not only did they find that calls and e-mails to the reference desk were on the rise, but also the quality of questions asked were shown to be more sophisticated as students were able to complete the simpler parts of research independently and then involved a librarian when complexity arose in their research (pp. 449-50).

These studies show how librarians can be made as an integral part of the academic setting.  The initial introduction to the library as a whole, in addition to a more personal introduction to the librarians, are important steps in getting a student comfortable with approaching the reference desk in the first place.  In addition, closer, more individualized instruction can result in students mastering the tools of information literacy that are required to become lifelong learners in a complicated electronic environment, regardless of the complexity and specialization of their discipline.  The reality is that even an advanced medical student, specializing in neurology, is entering a field in which the kind of research being conducted is in many ways far removed from what they learning as a practicing doctor.  In other words, using electronic databases is not something that comes naturally to anyone and a librarian is someone who is well trained to offer lessons in this area.

Bennett, E., & Simning, J. (2010). Embedded librarians and reference traffic:  A quantitative analysis. Journal of Library Administration, 50. pp. 443-457. doi 10.1080/01930826.2010.491437

Simmons, R. M., Morgan, K. M., & Davidson, S. A. (2012). Time to rethink the role of the library in educating doctors: Driving information literacy in the clinical environment. Journal of the Medical Library Association. Oct 2012; 100(4): 291-296 doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.100.4.011
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484954/

The American Journal of Semiotics

The American Journal of Semiotics was established in 1981 as the official journal of the Semiotic Society of America (Wikipedia, The American Journal of Semiotics).  The journal publishes essays, as well as reviews of works, dealing with semiotics.  It is an international journal, and is published quarterly.  The journal’s editorial board consists of professors from mostly American universities, including Purdue, Pennsylvania State University, Indiana University, and the University of California-Berkeley.

The journal considers itself multidisciplinary, as is evident in the nature of the field itself. Its goal is to explore the nature of communication and meaning.  Defined on the back of the title page of the journal, semiotics is the study of “signs and sign systems in order to describe, analyze, and interpret the full range of communication and culture experienced as discourse codes.” The discipline explores culture experienced as different codes of discourse, this may include works of consumer goods, art, events, and social norms, as well as texts.  The field of semiotics allows a student or researcher in anthropology to explore these different events and objects as cultural codes that work to communicating explicit and implicit messages and are part of cultural experience.

Articles in The American Journal of Semiotics range from topics on phenomenology, rhetoric, and visual art analyses, as well as articles written on theorists such as Lacan, Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Foucault.

The American Journal of Semiotics is available both online, through the Kent State Library, and in print at the Kent Main library up until 2000.

Website: http://semioticsocietyofamerica.org/the-american-journal-of-semiotics/

An Economic Analysis of Democracy - Evaluation

Written by professor of American economics, Randall G. Holcombe in 1985, An Economic Analysis of Democracy gives students of economics and politics a view of the relationship between American democracy and the economy.  Professor Holcombe uses different theoretical models in order to analyze the current workings of a voter model system influenced by special interests in order to come up with insights in to forming an effective model for economic decision making based on majority rule.

The book is relatively recent enough to offer students a foundation of fairly recent economic theories that have been influential in the past several decades, as well as allowing for a student to reflect on how Holcombe’s theory might be revised in order to reflect more contemporary views and conditions. Most of all, this work would form a good grounding as to point the student in a direction for generating new ideas as to the inner connectivity of democratic principles and economic theory and policy making.

Including the index, the book is 270 pages and includes a ten page bibliography that offers readers further reading into the theories discussed in the book.  At the time of writing the book, Randall G. Holcombe had been teaching economics at Auburn University for almost ten years, in addition to having been a faculty member at Texas A&M University. He has been widely published in economic journals and has written around five other books on American economics.

An Economic Analysis of Democracy is part of the Political and Social Economy series out of Southern Illinois University Press. Other books in the series include:

• ·         Economic Thought and Social Change by J. Ron Stanfield
• ·         Origins of Economic Thought and Justice by Joseph J. Spengler
• ·         The Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto by Daniel R. Fusfeld and Timothy Bates
• ·         Toward a Social Economy by Howard R. B. Owen

Economics librarian - where to begin?

Economics is something of a brave new frontier for this aspiring librarian. I would say that I would feel very uncomfortable being a reference librarian in economics as it is something that I have never really thought about too much and involves a lot subjects that I am not particularly fond of.  How this problem could be bridged for me is probably much the same as any student who would be new to this subject. The resources for becoming familiar with economics are not profoundly different from any other subject area.  This was somewhat confirmed in the literature this week. 

In the article "Information Overload," Pauline Melgoza, et al. (2002) discuss the various information habits of social science and economic students attending Texas A&M University. Their interest was in figuring out the preferences of different kinds of library users in order to update their collections to reflect these preferences. It should probably not come as a great surprise that users were interested in accessibility, convenience, ease of use, and accuracy as key considerations, along with speed of retrieval (pp. 34).  From that, it should also come as little surprise that free Internet services reigned supreme as a tool for information resources and retrieval (pp. 35), this is, after all, the age of Google.  Unlike our historian group that we reviewed last week, the economists seem to have more trust in electronic journals, although, much like almost any other group, the study shows that users prefer print books to e-books (pp. 35-6).

In other words, in terms of being a reference guide to economics students, it seems that our general resources are not incredibly different from guiding students in any other discipline.  This is part of what makes being a librarian interesting is that, in theory, when you understand the lay of the land you should be able to help patrons orient themselves to library services and resources despite your own knowledge on the particular subject. Although, in order to truly excel in the field and be of a valuable service to your patrons, the sooner you begin to understand the literature of the discipline, the better.

One of the positive aspects about economics as a subject is that it is a subject with a rather broad appeal, since it is so elementary in other political science majors, as well as having a large impact on ever day life for everyone, academics or not.  In this regard, there are more mainstream, or popular, resources out there that discuss economics.  This can be in the form of popular periodicals, like the Wall Street Journal, or it can be in the form of television shows on news channels, or in the form of pod casts, such as econtalk.org that we explored this week.  These resources are great because they are highly accessible to anyone who has an interest in the material existence of contemporary culture and an examination of the political, historic, and economic factors that make it possible.  There is a large range of topics within economics, so that there is likely to be something that appeals to just about everyone. There is little ability for any topic to escape the gravity of the economy.

The Libguide that stood out to me the most this week was the one put together by UNT, available at http://unt.v1.libguides.com/content.php?pid=348363.  This Libguide is very user-friendly, and even offers PowerPoint presentations on using the library and electronic resources provided by the library. The Libguide offers a list of free Internet sites that serve as convenient places to begin research on economic topics, as well as a top 10 databases list.  The Libguide also offers different lists with recommended resources based on accomplishing different tasks, such as places to go to look up company profiles, costs of living, and government information.

Melgoza, P., Mennel, P. A., Gyeszly, S. D., (2002). "Information Overload." Collection Building. Volume 21 (1), 2002. Pages 32-42. DOI 10.1108/01604950210414716

Historian Information Sources

 In their article, Historians and Their Information Sources, Margaret Stieg Dalton and Laurie Charnigo (2004), found that historians are seldom overwhelmed by information overload.  This is surprising considering the abundance of electronic journals and databases with a proliferation of resources on an over-abundance of topics. Part of this reason might be the greater specialization seen in many academic fields that have left some historians feeling as though their particular field is under-represented in the available databases. Another problem that occurs is that particular libraries and universities do not have access to all available databases, and as a result, some historians are denied access to potentially useful resources (pp. 414-5).

Interesting, as well, is that the historians maintain a distrust toward e-journals in general and remain fixed on the use of printed sources as a more trustworthy information source (pp. 414).  Perceived problems with e-journals and databases included (pp. 412-4):

• Sources not having the needed information
• Sources not covering the dates needed
• Sources not offering full text
• Sources not having a worldly view, being mostly Anglo-oriented
• Inadequate indexing terminology
• Problems with sources in non-English languages and translations

 The historians surveyed expressed an opinion that e-journals were often more useful to undergraduate students, as opposed to true scholarship (pp. 414).

Early on in the article, the authors characterize history as being a kind of sense-making of a heap of facts (pp. 400), and as such, the historian is characterized as being interested in primary sources and historical objects, as well as being highly interdisciplinary.  With a high interest and focus on wading through these heaps of facts from a multifaceted world of knowledge and information, it is a shame that electronic resources are being under-appreciated in this discipline (at least, as this article shows); electronic databases have the potential of uniting disciplines almost seamlessly through the use of Knowledge Organization Systems, and ideally, should result in less travel expenses and leg work on the part of the scholar. Instead, the resources are viewed (perhaps rightfully so) as containing research that is not as rigorous or valuable as their physical counterparts, and historians are still waiting to see a greater maturation of e-resources.

Dalton, S. M., (2004). Historians and Their Information Sources. In College & Research Libraries.
Vol. 65. No. 5. pp. 400-425. http://crl.acrl.org/content/65/5/400.full.pdf+html

Royal Society 
The website royalsociety.org offers a unique perspective on the history of science from an interdisciplinary perspective.  I was most interested in the different research projects that the Royal Society is currently involved in. Among the projects are:

• Constructing scientific communities
  This is a look at how scientific communities entered into the popular cultures of the 19th and 21st centuries.  This project is interesting because of the rising interest that seems to be had in promoting STEM curriculums, television programs based on scientific discovery, the popularity of science fiction as entertainment, and the growing interest in Maker Spaces, with their focus on technology.
• Publishing the Philosophical Transactions: the social, cultural, and economic history of a learned journal 1665-2015
  As the title of the research project indicates, this project aims to illuminate researchers on the socio-economic historical development of very old, circulating scientific journal. This project really highlights the interdisciplinary nature of history.
• Origins of science as a visual pursuit
  Another project that widens the scope of historical study. This project examines the effect of art and artists on natural philosophers of the 17th century, and how their relationship effected the development of both the arts and the sciences.

Lib Guides
The lib guide that stood out the most to me, was the lib guide published by David C. Murray at Temple University, last updated 2014 (http://temple.v1.libguides.com/content.php?pid=1264&sid=5395).  This lib guide offers suggestions for print and electronic resources down both the left and right navigation areas that include resources that are of a high interest to history students. Each of the sections that are offered by this lib guide are very nicely divided and easy to follow. The section on databases is divided into three tiers, with the top tier offering the most comprehensive collections of articles.  Finally, Murray has separated primary and secondary resources along with definitions of each and guides on how to find each type of resources.

October 7 – 13

“That withered paradigm”

                “There is something about the Web,” writes Peter Walsh (2003), “that makes the idea of the expert seem withered, even disreputable and laughable.”  Walsh’s article, appearing in the anthology of new media related essays entitled Democracy and New Media, calls into question the ‘expert paradigm’ and its relevancy on the Internet.  In the article, Walsh (2003) sets out to define the expert paradigm, identify a few key points of its origins (though not a complete history of the concept), and link its disruption with advances in communication technology starting from around the time of the printing press.

                According to Walsh (2003), the expert paradigm is one that requires a body of knowledge, and particularly an abstract knowledge that has some predictive aura surrounding it.  This sort of body of knowledge lends itself easily to religious knowledge, especially in the form of the Church in Western cultures. This sort of expert paradigm also has an “interior and exterior, an outer group of laypersons and an inner group of experts” (pp. 366). 

Maintaining this system requires the establishment of certain rules that restrict access to the group’s knowledge and regulate the amount of access that different levels of members have to that knowledge base.  But the part that I found most significant in Walsh’s (2003) defining points of the expert paradigm, was that Walsh identifies that the expert paradigm is “inherently unstable. [The expert paradigm] is constantly threatened by factions and turf battles from within and by skepticism or jealousy of its privileged status from without” (pp. 367).

The problem that the expert paradigm faces is that with the advancement and dissemination of communication technologies, those fault lines created by the competing factions from both inside and outside of the inner-circles are made all the more deeper and visible for everyone to see.  As Walsh (2003) notes, “important to the Reformation was the fact that Luther made use of a developing new technology and printed his views” (pp. 367).  The difference today, with the Internet, is that not only can everyone see these fault lines, but anyone can participate in their expansion.  The lines between expert and non-expert quickly become blurred as we lose focus of the author (if one can even be identified) and we cannot see their identifying insignia.

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007) writes about the Great Wizard of Oz assuming a great and terrifying persona in order to capture enough pathos and ethos that his subjects are likely to equate his voice with absolute truth (pp. 140).  Weinberger (2007) is also writing about “truth and authority” and how the boundaries have shifted in the digital age.  In this case, the website Wikipedia is Weiberger’s (2007) golden example of a site that “gives up on being an Oz-like authority and helps us better decide what to believe” (pp. 141). 

The way in which Wikipedia disrobes itself of being the authoritative voice of truth, according to Weinberger (2007), is that Wikipedia is up front about its many possible weaknesses in a series of notices concerning the disputable accuracy of certain articles.  The result of the expert paradigm being so usurped is that, as Weinberger (2007) claims, “deciding what to believe is now our burden” (pp. 143).  The advancement of communication technologies has resulted in a time in which the information seeker herself can participate in the production of expert-like knowledge; a kind of authority that was once reserved only for the wealthy who could afford both the leisure time and publication expenses.

One problem that could arise from this transition is whether or not we now put too much stock into our own beliefs.  Are we only replacing the external Fountainhead with our own inner-truth based on our own limited experiences and observations?  While I do not completely argue against the value of lived-experiences as a resource for certain truths and values, it is also important that we do not lose focus on the value of the expert paradigm.  An expert, after all, is believed to be a person with a wide breadth of experience, knowledge, and understanding about a certain issue or topic—something that goes deeper than merely accumulating a list of facts about a topic.

Having ‘experts’ is important for keeping arguments in check and building the structure upon which a particular discourse rests.  We learn from experts, but not necessarily exactly whatever it is the expert is preaching, but rather, we learn more about our own views and arguments.  This only works, however, when we accept a certain amount of authority from those experts.  If we do not do this then we only reinforce the belief in our own views without having the ability to critically evaluate them and without having the benefit of an expert with a high degree of knowledge in a particular field to help us from falling into obvious errors in our own solipsism.

In the end of the “Withered paradigm” article, Walsh (2003) argues that the expert paradigm is in no threat of radically disappearing.  It is undergoing changes, as it has been for hundreds of years, but it will still remain.  I think that this is evident when one considers the goals of courses in information literacy on the Internet.  The idea of these courses is to learn how again to recognize authority, this time on the Internet.  In these courses, we re-learn how to look for authority in the form of professionalism, references, well articulated arguments, organization of the website, and both logical as well as grammatical clarity.  And, again, we learn to look for the author and to do research into the expertise of the author.

If a new Oz were to catch on to this trend in training in information literacy, such a great wizard would likely take on the form of some great socially constructed website.  A website that was easily available and seemingly ubiquitous. One in which seemed to be the suggested search result for just about every search engine query. It would be one so unassuming in appearance as to visibly deflect authority back onto its reader.

Walsh, P. (2003). That withered paradigm: The Web, the expert, and the information hegemony. In

Democracy and New Media. Henry Jenkins & David Thorburn (Eds.). Cambridge,

            Mass: MIT Press. pp. 343 – 364.

Weinberger, D. (2007). Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. New York,

NY: Henry Holt and company. pp. 129 – 147.

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