[Asis-l] Question for candidates

[Michel J. Menou]

Nick's response to Jeremy Hunsinger is as always interesting and
challenging.
My suggestion of Building Information Science and Technology as the
core knowledge area for the digital age was calling for a collective
dream and struggle that could help us achieve more dynamism and
visibility.
Of course many disciplines may think the same for themselves.
I am not assuming information science is the core knowledge, just
saying it would be great if we could turn it to be it. And there is a
need or a clearer vision of what makes the core knowledge among all
the disciplines and practices.
Re the balance, some consider it is fairly achieved. But in the
members' survey, we hear many voices that call for more this and less
that, or the opposite. The way out is perhaps more of everything. In
any case we have to seek ways to minimize frustrations and increase
satisfactions.I agree that interaction and cross-fertilization are not
less, if not more, important. But this cannot occur in the absence of
a significant participation of happy epresentatives of all the
categories.

Best regards,
 
Michel                          mailto:Michel.Menou at wanadoo.fr

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From:    nicholas belkin <nick at belkin.rutgers.edu>
To:      jeremy hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu>
Date:    Tuesday, September 2, 2003, 10:16:13 PM
Subject: [Asis-l] Questions for candidates
Files:   <none>
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With respect to Jeremy Hunsinger's questions, I would say the following:

1. I'm somewhat suspicious of the general idea of there being a single
"core knowledge area for the digital age"; I believe that I can think of
many areas of knowledge that can legitimately be construed as "core", or
at least "important for people to know about" for the digital age. Media
literacy, which I think is not the same as information literacy, would
be based in a knowledge area that is not information science and
technology, for instance. So I don't think that I would work toward such
a goal at all. More appropriate might be for the Information Science
Education Committee to consider not only education for information
professionals, but also how education in some aspects of information
science and technology education might best be delivered to society as a
whole, and how ASIS&T could play a role in such delivery. This would
entail, obviously, outreach and inclusion, and I suppose
democratization, in that the goal would be to help to insure, to the
extent that ASIS&T can do so, that people in general have the
intellectual tools that they need in order to be effective members of
society in the digital age.

2. The goal of achieving a "better balance" in ASIS&T between theory and
practice, research and application, local and global concerns assumes
that the balance at the moment is not so good, and should become
better.  Certainly there has been ongoing discussion in ASIS&T about
these issues, and concern has been expressed both about "balance" (which
I take to mean the prominence of one or the other of the members of the
presumed dichotomies in ASIS&T activities, or in information science and
technology in general), and ensuring appropriate interaction between the
pairs. My view is that we should work toward ensuring that the members
of these pairs exert appropriate influence on one another; I don't
myself think that there is a problem of balance. In quite pragmatic
terms, achieving appropriate influence is being accomplished, at least
to some extent, by ASIS&T in its mix of sessions at the annual and
mid-year meetings, and in its mix of articles in the Bulletin and in
JASIST. I would be concerned to use the principles of outreach and
inclusion to make sure that the communities associated with what appear
to be poles be represented in ASIS&T, especially in membership and at
the meetings. I guess that I would also like to find ways to convince
people that these are not in fact ends of a dimension, working far apart
from one another, but rather parts of a circle, profoundly influencing
one another. Inclusion and outreach, as indicated above, might help in
this respect. I'm not sure about how principles of democratization and
transparency would work with respect to this issue.