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Informed


If we accept the idealist perspective and its acknowledgement of the personal dimension of information, it would be erroneous to claim that informa- tion simply demands that someone is exposed to it. They must be in a position to be affected – or “informed” – by it as well. We may postulate that in any given situation much will depend, then, on the attributes of the recipient. On the most fundamental level, they must have receptive capability.


Needs and wants


If, for example, the stimulus takes a visual form, it will not amount to infor- mation to a blind person; if it is oral in nature it cannot be considered informa- tion to anyone who is deaf. Cognitively, it must not only be recognised as relevant to the person’s needs and wants but also be intellectually acces- sible to the individual and meaningful to them – factors which will necessarily vary from person to person. The content of an advanced treatise may amount to information to an expert because they are able to construct sense from it but the significance of what is written may be entirely lost on a layperson. In addi- tion, the individual must be sufficiently open to new ideas to be willing to invest attention in material that does not fit with their prevailing attitude. It might be said that what constitutes informa- tion is – much like beauty – in the eye of the beholder.


The idealist perspective highlights the subjective dimension of one end of the information process – the effect of a stimulus on a recipient; the work of Brenda Dervin in the 1970s reminds us that this aspect is equally important at the opposite end – the point of creation. She indicates that although informa- tion often involves the representation of objective reality, it may also relate


April-May 2023


to the ideas that people impose more internally on reality.5


Let us imagine that


these are then made available to others via some kind of recording or communication. There is a wide spectrum of such subjective material, ranging from purely personal opinions to statements that the individual might in their own mind regard unequivo- cally as “fact”. Consider, for example, how often eye witnesses to the same incident offer very different accounts of what has happened. In its most extreme form, infor- mation may involve “delusions”.6


Different realities


In today’s world of ill-founded pro- nouncements made on social media, “fake news” and conspiracy theories, Dervin’s ideas on the subjective nature of informa- tion are perhaps more relevant than ever, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between Dervin’s two seem- ingly discrete types of information – on one hand, material representing objective reality and, on the other, claims that do no more than reflect an author’s “internal reality”. If we couple this challenge with the idealistic perspective of information which emphasises the importance of the recipient and we consider the various agendas, expectations and values that people bring to their processing of material which is conveyed to them by providers whose own purposes may be far from impartial, we perhaps begin to appreciate the true extent of the problems that today face librarians in helping to ensure that information users gain a balanced picture of what is happening “out there”. What, then, can be done by the informa- tion professional to facilitate the process by which users truly become informed via the exploitation of appropriate material? There would seem a range of possibilities, such as:


l promoting the practice of reading;


l reducing barriers that inhibit the uptake of information;


l providing sound content for users; l directing them to high quality information;


l enabling individuals to recognise trust- worthy originators;


l helping others to evaluate material for quality, as well as relevance;


l fostering a mindset of “proactive scep- ticism”;


l offering opportunities for people to rec- ognise and confront their own prejudices;


l encouraging open-mindedness in infor- mation users.


We may say that some of these actions are not only pivotal to the role of the information professional – they are fun- damental, also, to the nature of education itself. IP


l This article is modelled on a presentation delivered by the author in Whitley Bay High School’s 2022 Christmas Lecture Pro- gramme. The PowerPoint slides are available from andrew.shenton@whitleybayhighschool.org.


l Andrew works at Whitley Bay High School as a member of support staff. His remit includes research and supervising pupils studying for the Extended Project Qualification.


References


1 CrowdScience. BBC World Service, 29 July 2022. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1pq5


2 Wersig, G. and Neveling, U. The phenomena of interest to information science. The Information Scientist, 9 (4), 1975, pp. 127-40.


3 Buckland, M. Library Services in Theory and Context, 2nd ed. 1999. https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/sunsite/Li- brary%20Services%20in%20Theory%20and%20Context,%202nd%20 Edition.pdf


4 Ranganathan, S.R. The Five Laws of Library Science. London: Edward Goldston Ltd, 1931.


5 Dervin, B. Strategies for dealing with human information needs: Information or communication? Journal of Broad- casting, 20 (3), 1976, pp. 324-33; Dervin, B. Useful theory for librarianship: Communication, not information. Drexel Library Quarterly, 13 (3), 1977, pp. 16-32.


6 Dervin, B. An Overview of Sense-making Research: Concepts, Methods, and Results to Date. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communications Association, Dallas, Texas, May 1983. URL: https://faculty. washington.edu/wpratt/MEBI598/Methods/An%20Overview%20of%20 Sense-Making%20Research%201983a.htm


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 45


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