Interdisciplinarity, Interactivity, and Interoperability for Educating the Digerati

As networked digital information proliferates and modern society's need to have access to information irrespective of location rises, the education needed for the digerati, defined loosely as the digital intelligentsia, the whole class of expert digital information professionals, becomes an important area about which all information professionals should stay informed. This paper describes the three concepts interdisciplinarity, interactivity, and interoperability that are an integral part of digital library research and their use in the curriculum development, teaching, and learning of a specific area of study within Library and Information Science (LIS), namely knowledge organization (KO). KO, studied intellectually, self-referentially, and immersively, it is argued, can provide the foundation for the modern digerati. Introducing the Digerati The Oxford English Dictionary (2005) has a draft entry for the word digerati and defines it as “Those people having professional involvement or (exceptional) expertise in information technology; computing experts regarded as a class.1” The word digerati is a combination of ‘digital’ and ‘erati’ and; the digerati can be considered akin to the ‘literati’ that the OED defines as: men of letters, the learned class as a whole. Similarly, the digerati means the class of individuals who have superior problem-solving skills not just in computing and information technology but in the whole gamut of digital and its associated library, information, and media, literacy skills for an over-abundant information environment (Gilster, 1997; Bawden, 2001). Articles in popular newspapers such as the UK Guardian (MacLeod, 2005), San Francisco Chronicle (Kopytoff, 2005), The Scotsman (Jamieson, 2005), and The New York Times (Markoff, 2005) use the term digerati to refer to a range of people from computer developers, bloggers, and dot.commers to Internet surfers and often usually limiting the meaning to the digitally literate (just like the literati sometimes means ‘well-educated’). In this paper, the term digerati is used in the original sense from William Safire (1992), who quotes Race: “Digerati, n.pl., people highly skilled in the processing and 1 The OED Online (2005) provides the following etymology for digerati: “1992 N.Y. Times 29 Jan. D7/1 His opinions, though often controversial, are taken seriously among the computer digerati. 1995 New Scientist 25 Mar. 45/1 People are increasingly enabled by communications technology to become members of the ‘digerati’, shipping bits of information around a seamless global medium. 2000 Independent 17 Apr. (Monday Review section) 9/2 The book has become an overnight sensation, with many a digerati rushing to download the book before their peers did.” The book referenced is Digital Literacy by Paul Gilster (1997). manipulation of digital information; wealthy or scholarly techno-nerds.'' (Safire,1992). That is, the digerati are not just the digital intelligentsia, they are also the manipulators and processors of digital information. They are information professionals and experts and the digital librarians (a.k.a. scholarly “techno-nerds”). Besides possessing all the literacy skills that Bawden reviews, their repertoire includes the expert knowledge and the values (ethics) necessary for building the knowledge society. This paper assumes that the goal of information studies is the education of a digerati, those who will play key roles in helping to build the knowledge society. It also assumes that besides traditional library values such as access, technology and organization of information are core areas for library and information (LIS) study. It argues for a broader vision of knowledge organization (KO) by assuming that this is a foundational area in the development of the digerati, and explains how one is being implemented, through the KO curriculum, for the education of the digerati at the School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS), University of Arizona, Tucson2. The approaches discussed can also be used to educate a wider audience than LIS but this notion is not explored further in this paper. Why Knowledge Organization? 2 This paper is based on a presentation at the "Developing a Digital Libraries Education Workshop" held in conjunction with the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2005 (JCDL 2005), Denver, Colorado, June 711, 2005. See http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/877/. A cluster analysis of LIS curricula at American Library Association-accredited US and Canadian programs in 1999 showed that the following areas were the main ones covered in the Master's degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS) curriculum of 44 schools (Beheshti, 1999): •Technology •Management •Organization of information •Searching and database development •Collection development •Mathematical methods and research •Sociocultural aspects •Non-print media •Rare materials and conservation •Sources of information •Reference materials •Archives •Children literature and services •Professional issues The study concluded: "Technology is by far the most intense concept covered in all LIS programs, indicating a change in the MLIS programs from a few years ago. Although it affects every aspect of the curriculum, technology is not the only cause of change...As we move towards the digital information, the concept of organization (of information) is intensely covered by LIS programs” (Beheshti, 1999). Critics have pointed out that a theoretical introduction to the organization of information is not the same as practical experience in cataloging and many solutions such as alternative modes of delivery for cataloging education, cross-training of reference librarians for cataloging, and the apprentice model have emerged or are being explored in response to the cataloging shortage and the perceived decreased commitment on the part of library schools to bibliographic control of traditional forms and formats. For example, Janet Swan Hill, Director of Technical Services at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in a discussion post on Educat (Hill, 2004), wrote:"-as a practitioner who hires catalogers, (and who has a long-standing interest in education from that perspective), rather than as an educator, --as an employer in the wilds of Colorado, far from multiple major population centers, and far from most LIS programs...I am coming close to being convinced that distance education may be the last best hope for salvation for making decent cataloging education available across the country." Swan was hearkening back to a theme of change that she had expounded as early as 2002, if not earlier: “Increased availability of cataloging for mainstream titles in mainstream formats highlighted the need to provide catalog access for other materials rare, or local items, and materials in formats other than books, or to provide better cataloging for material previously given short shrift (e.g. by analyzing contents and series). Technology brought a proliferation of almost metastatic proportions of types of information resources acquired by libraries. Even the basic view of the role of the catalog changed.” (Hill, 2002). Hill does not say that the change is for the worse although the history of digital library research shows a preoccupation with information discovery rather than bibliographic control and in some cases a reinvention of the wheel; but in many of these discussions a narrow vision of cataloging is propounded and there are at least two reasons why a narrow vision of library book cataloging should be abandoned and a broader vision of knowledge organization, with cataloging as one strategy in an arsenal, embraced. One, information science, viewed for our purposes as the computer processing of information, has yielded significant benefits that human only methods such as cataloging do at great costs of labor and low productivity (Osborne, 1942; Graham, 1990). Two, the history of cataloging shows that the cataloging process is also inextricably bound in activities such as bibliography, classification, or indexing and other methods that seek to provide intellectual access to information resources (Merrill, 1914; Mann, 1943). If cataloging is to survive into the 21st century, we must learn from our past and be prepared to incorporate changes (Hsieh-Yee, 2002) such as the new paradigm for the organization of information outlined by Jeng (1993). All of this means that for LIS students to take their place as the digerati, abstruse and abstract knowledge about organizing information in traditional environments such as libraries and archives, practical skills with digital information, and traditional library values must be better integrated, research used to inform education, and the gap with practice bridged. To do so, three concepts that underlie digital library research, namely interdisciplinarity, interactivity, and interoperability, can be used as axis points for LIS education. These three concepts can be used in many ways: as approaches to designing a curriculum, as topics to be taught, as aids in the design of thematic immersive experiences, and as values, skills, technologies, and knowledge in their own right.