"Information is Becoming a Conversation"

Karen Schneider is one of the speakers at the perennial "Top Technology Trends" panel sponsored by LITA at the ALA Annual Meeting. This year, the top trendy people are posting their comments on the LITA blog, and Karen's post is outstanding.

A clip:

"Information is becoming a conversation. Information is no longer asynchronous received wisdom disseminated in formal publications to a passive and largely unexamining community. Instead, increasingly, information is increasingly synchronous."

What does this mean? It means that there's no longer a single record of authority; there's a path or trail of community-created authority.

Taken together with The Krafty Librarian's post on outstanding impact factors of open-access journals, we can begin to see where the concept of "synchonous information" leads. Open, freely available information becomes available for comment, and people WILL comment on it.

Unfortunately, impact factors don't and can't measure how many times an article has ben emailed, posted to a discussion list, blogged about, or otherwise commented on. I imagine if this added feature were available, open access titles would blow anything under subscription away.

Librarians are heavily invested in the concept of a single record of authority. There are good sources, and there are bad sources, and we decide which are which, don't we? In the synchronous information world that Karen Schneider posits, the river of information will just flow around us if we try to be any kind of barricade or block.