Information Masters and Slaves

Fons Wijnhoven knows how to attract attention. Wijnhoven's article in JASIST has interesting language. To describe the information providers or authorities and information seekers Wijnhoven writes,

 ...these authorities may be named information masters, and the people who need to be informed may be called information slaves, because they are dependent on the master's resources to become well informed. This inequality of informing resources results in opinion-influencing power of the masters, from which it is difficult for slaves to emancipate.

After the dramatic language near the start of the article, straightforward source evaluation techniques are framed with Hegelian dialectic. I prefer simplicity to the 17-step flow chart in the article. On the other hand, it's possibly that I'm eliminating important steps when I boil things down to a handful of steps for myself and for students.

I like one step of his method that I don't use or teach enough. The step is to formulate an antithesis, the mortal enemy of your thesis, and to look for and evaluate information supporting the antithesis. That step could counteract confirmation bias.

Waiting for Word on a New Dean

[June 4 Update from the Provost's Office:  A campus announcement is forthcoming. Pending the relevant approvals, the library will have a new dean on July 16.] 

I admit it; I'm jealous of other academic units on campus that are between deans. Those three colleges have updates in the Daily Egyptian about the selection stage for their replacement deans. The library's dean search didn't make it to the article. At Morris Library, the interviews for a new dean have been completed, but no one in the library knows* whether a new dean is "to be determined" or is "to be announced."



* By "knows," I mean has an official confirmation that can be shared. I heard a rumor from someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, but I don't know in any official way what has happened since the decision process went to Anthony Hall.