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| Home Page | My experience as an information sector worker can be split into two main sectors: public, and law libraries -
of the latter, government and now private practice. In all of the physical buildings I have worked in,
my role has been to ensure that information is circulated in its most accurate and representative form.
A core part of my role in the public library was finding out the best way to claim benefits.
In a law library, I can be asked on which day the issue of asylum seekers was discussed in Parliament.
One is community-based information; the other is academic research. Either way, it is I who have been asked to retrieve it.
In which form I have been asked to deliver it? The elderly woman who wishes to apply for a rebate on her council tax is given the option of my either:
Inevitably, I printed out the forms. In scenario number 2, a lawyer requires the text of a law report. They can walk in to the library and retrieve it from the individual journal on the shelf and take a copy, or they can email the request to me. I will then log on to a database owned by a publisher, retrieve the .pdf copy and email it back to them. This will have taken me around five minutes to do. They can then have the file on their computer or print it out. I never asked if they went on to print out the report I had emailed them, but chances were, if they were going over the text to analyse a precedent, they would print out the report to annotate and make notes on it.* The printing of the document is an indicator in itself: the form or report may well be on-line, but the user would rather handle it as a tangible object. Two simple requests have illustrated a number of problems humans have in negotiating with the global information environment. The local council has the ability to process your form on-line, the computer can be searched and the case report retrieved from its hard drive to be read on its screen. Why do our two users over-ride these options? Susan Greenfield quotes Neil Gershenfeld when examining this – ‘Books boot instantly, and have a high contrast/high-resolution display; they are viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light; they offer fast random access to any page, with instant visual and tactile feedback; they are easily annotated with no need for batteries or maintenance; finally, they are robustly packaged.’ (Greenfield, 2003, p.15) For our elderly user it could simply be a case of poor eyesight ruling out the use of a VDU, for the lawyer, they might just wish to make notes on a piece of paper. |