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Like so many of the skills we use every day, critical evaluation of a source comes so naturally we can forget that it’s a skill we’ve learned.
INSIGHT
President’s View
Evolving skills to meet new challenges and opportunities
W
ITH the nights drawing in, the season of library conferences seems a long way off –
either looking back to the fantastic whole-profession events we’ve seen with the CILIP conference in Birmingham and the CILIPS conference in Dundee, or to the more sector-specific events like the Copyright Conference or LILAC, as well as many more.
And of course, this November we’re also hosting our first ever Libraries Rewired conference, focusing on digital transformation across the whole breadth of the library, information, and knowledge management profession!
Artificial intelligence
I’m conscious that just about every event I’ve been to this year – and I’ve been amazingly privileged to be invited to a great many more than my schedule allowed me to attend – has included a focus on digital and artificial intelligence, and I suspect that there are at least some of us who are starting to feel a slight sense of ‘AI fatigue’ from discussing it so much, but I want to touch on the subject here anyway. I am conscious that digital transformation doesn’t just impact our service delivery, but also the role of information professionals. We’ve always been trusted sources both of information, and of information skills, but I think we should all be mindful that that latter aspect of our profession is likely to become more important than ever.
Overload
If previously, we had to be concerned by the risks of information overload and the
October-November 2023
pressures it placed on users struggling to find the right resource for their needs, it seems that one of the next major challenges our profession will face is helping users navigate a misinformation overload.
With our skills and expertise, it’s probably easier for us as information professionals, to read a ChatGPT- authored paragraph and register that it feels slightly ‘off’, as our brains register on some level that the pattern of the words feels less natural, flowing more in response to statistical probabilities than the cadences of more natural rhetoric – but unless, as we so often are, you’re already well-attuned to different writing styles in different contexts, and have at least a passing familiarity with the style of output normally produced by an AI model, it’s much harder to spot.
Skills and learning
Environmental impact aside, as AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous, users won’t simply have to struggle with the risk of missing information they need amongst the chaff of irrelevant results, but also the challenge of picking out reliable sources from false ones. Like so many of the skills we use every day, critical evaluation of a source comes so naturally we can forget that it’s a skill we’ve learned – but I believe a key role of our profession in the coming years will be making it clear that it’s a skill we can and will pass on.
Our profession isn’t always seen as a teaching profession, but I think it’s clear to almost everyone working in this sector that – at least at times – teaching forms a core part of our work. Even those of us whose roles aren’t directly public facing are enabling teaching and learning opportunities for users and, more often
John Trevor-Allen is President of CILIP.
www.cilipconference.org.uk
than not, teaching our own colleagues either directly or by cascading learning points back from conferences and CPD events we’ve attended.
From helping a customer set up their first email account in a public library to supporting independent reading for the first time, from ensuring the accessible provision of key resources to ensuring a medical consultant can actually interpret the vast landscape of evidence before them, we often find ourselves supporting others in their learning.
The scope and importance of our role as information skills trainers might be about to increase – but as with so many things, this is a challenge we already have the skills to meet, and a role we’re already fulfilling, even if our users don’t always know it. When faced with such a potentially daunting challenge as this, it’s worth reminding ourselves that passing on our skills in information literacy and retrieval isn’t a new part of our roles, even if the pace of technological change is pushing the stakes higher. IP
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