Caveat Lector

Andrew Dillon makes me happy yet again with his thoughts on LIS research:

It is no coincidence that our most frequent theorizing is in the broad area of ‘information seeking’, where there exist dozens of models of human behaviour and cognition in the context of use, many reasonably plausible, but few robust tests are ever conducted that discriminate between them. It is almost as if the field is content to approach theorizing only as far as it ties weakly to systems design, but not to any more ambitious effort at explaining fundamentals. Can we now agree to place a moratorium on further general models of information seeking?

Yes. Please? And can we dump information-seeking models out of ALA library-school accreditation so that we can then dump stupid pointless information-seeking courses from MLS curricula? Sometimes the problems with library schools aren’t library schools’ fault!

Read the whole article; what Dillon has to say about LIS faculty’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the pathetic preparation for a research career vouchsafed many LIS Ph.D students, is worthwhile—and from my observations, right on. (And another reason to resist the sirens. I don’t even want to put up with graduate school for the sake of a good education. Why the seven hells should I do it for a lousy one?)

I’ve been asked to guest-speak on open access and IRs at SLIS’s digital-libraries course in November. This may have been a mild tactical error on the professor’s part, because my thought on LIS and IRs dovetails very neatly with this examination of an OA LIS journal:

Library school professors, particularly, need to show more leadership in the open-access movement. If you are not a part of an open-access journal, join a current project or start a project of your own. If you are an author, submit your work to an open-access journal. Be sure to make your work openly accessible. Don’t be obscure!

That exact apathy is at work with LIS professors and librarians with regard to self-archiving, as the thin pickings at E-LIS and DList demonstrate. I don’t mind (politely) pointing that out to library-school students. Salience can be a powerful motivator, and we repository-rats can’t afford to be too terribly picky about our tactics.