This post was originally titled “ASIS&T 2009: Day 1″, but I think I just crashed that saturday night, after a full day at the symposium, and the rest of my time in Vancouver was a blur of trying to attend a few interesting sessions, take some time out to see the city and visit a local friend, and wake up every morning to enjoy the relaxing breakfast at the O’Canada House B&B. However, the next time I visit, I think I might try out the Listel Hotel, who decorates their rooms in collaboration with the anthropology department at UBC.
One of the things that I was really looking forward to at the conference, was meeting some of the big names in information science, albeit from afar. Instead of boring you with a play by play, I’m going to give you instead what I have come away from the conference with, in terms of further understanding and appreciation. The next few posts are the highlights of the individuals I met, beginning with Sonnenwald, who was a marvelous speaker.
Diane Sonnenwald was one of the keynote speakers at the SIG USE symposium. SIG USE is a special interests group that are interested in issues around information seeking and use, or information seeking behaviour. There is a substantial body of literature that falls into this category, and attending the symposium highlighted for me how loaded some of the seemingly intuitive terms actually are. For example, people have issues with the term “information sharing” as too broad, for fruitful discussion, and the concept of an information need is taken for granted as an automatic phenomenon. I don’t know how I feel about it either way, but I recognize my ignorance in terms of the roots of this tradition, something I will try to address.
What Diane inspired me with was her collaborative work with scientists on many funded projects. She related many of the challenges that as an information professional, she often had a hard time convincing the scientists that her work is needed, and often had to work with misconceptions others have about her field. The output of her work is quite design oriented, in the tradition of engaging the user in the process of design, which is not typical of most computer science or engineering projects. I was quite excited as it was the same idea in Buxton’s work that inspired me during the On-Demand Book Service project, and I asked her whether that outcome is explicit in her collaborations from the get go. Her response is that it is more a result of fruitful collaborations. You find a few collaborators, whether individuals or institutions, with the explicit intent that you want a project run the way you want (i.e. with an information perspective from the get go), and the desired outcome that you are seeking (a pilot of some sort). When you achieve progress in such a collaborative context, word spreads, and new opportunities spring up. The point is, it doesn’t happen over night. You have to be firm, you have to be clear about what you want, and you have to learn to say no to opportunities and individuals who want to work with you, but got the wrong idea.
In a separate post, I will share with you the pointers Diane shared with the symposium participants on her experience of what effective collaboration looks like. Next editions, I will share with you my experience with, David W. McDonald, Marcia Bates, and others such as Turnbull and Choo.
