Christine Dugdale reports on the Knowledge: Creation, Organization and Use conference held in Washington recently.
Knowledge: Creation, Organization and Use was the name of the ASIS (American Society For Information Science) Annual Conference that was held 31 October – 4 November, 1999 in Washington, D.C. [1]
The conference's declared aim was to look at current (and imminent) knowledge creation, acquisition, navigation, correlation, retrieval, management and dissemination methods, practices and potentialities, as well as their implementation and impact, and the theories behind these developments.
The conference sought to achieve this aim by a very diverse selection of contributed papers, panel discussions and SIG-arranged sessions that looked at different technological tools, theories, legal concerns and operational policies.
In particular, it set itself the very difficult task of trying to look at knowledge rather than information. This was because the organisers believed that information, transformed into shared knowledge, could change the face of work, education, and every other aspect of life. It was noted that, today, we have an increasing capacity to generate, gather, model, represent and retrieve more complex, cross-disciplinary and multi-format data and ideas from new sources and at varying scales than ever before. They particularly requested papers that reported on ‘real life’ results that listed both successes and failures and were able to offer recommendations to others.
Sessions were presented through five tracks:
It was, of course, very difficult to obtain a full flavour of all these tracks as they ran in parallel along with a bewildering array of SIG panels, discussions and business meetings. Delegates were encouraged to ‘mix and match’ sessions and even papers within sessions. Although the latter was a very disturbing trend for speakers and audience alike to which I did not like to add, I did take advantage of the apparent ASIS culture of attending full sessions in different tracks.
It would have been impossible to hear more than a minority of the presentations under the contributed paper category, as there were 236 papers. Apparently, these were selected from three times that number submitted. There were also 240 presentations made in 60 sessions to 1007 delegates from 31 different countries and six continents. Two hundred of these were first time attendees like me. Indeed, it was remarkable that there was not more confusion as I assume that they must have been as mystified as I was by all the peripheral meetings that were taking place under the headings of totally incomprehensible initials. We were, however, all clearly labelled with ribbons and badges that signalled our need to be ‘mentored’ – a signal that I was very careful to bin before leaving for the airport! (Although it might have led to meaningful jet-lagged relationships!)
This labelling, however, did not help me to penetrate the vast amount of mis-information about times and room numbers that was given out during the week. Some degree of confusion must have been inevitable when so many things were happening concurrently over two entire floors of the massive venue, but it was unfortunate that a society whose raison d’être is information science should have mis-informed delegates so often. I was forced, for example, to question whether a rather flattering large audience heard me because they had planned to do so or because they were really waiting for the entirely different session that was scheduled for that room on one set of documentation!
This audience, however, was not as large as the one that gathered for the plenary session. This occupied so large a space that two large screens were deemed necessary at either end of the room and this, like all sessions, was taped for those who could not hear or who had wanted to listen to two simultaneous sessions. The two screens, however, proved a little optimistic as the technology fell apart before the first speaker was able to show a single slide.
An excellent policy of starting and finishing each session on time was rigorously adhered to. It was also the first conference that I have attended for many years that was not disturbed by mobile phones, although several laptops merrily pealed as their users logged on or off.
One very welcome innovation was a plenary track overview session immediately after the opening speaker and an even more welcome wrap-up session to conclude the conference.
The first took the form of two concurrent sessions at which different track overviews were given before launching into papers and panels. Inevitably, this meant that some choices still had to be made and overviews of only two tracks could be heard. I thought, however, that this was something that other conferences that hold parallel sessions could emulate.
The wrap-up session, however, involved no such decisions and proved very valuable. During this, representatives of each of the conference tracks, along with other leaders, reflected upon discussions and presentations. This proved an ideal opportunity to hear about sessions that delegates had not attended and to check whether their own subjective interpretation of sessions coincided with that of others. Many of the wrap-up speakers, indeed, referred to the fact that so many papers were interrelated and that many might well have sat as easily if not more easily in other tracks. Initial conference ‘decisions’ have to be made based upon relatively short abstracts.
The following summary, therefore, is based upon both a personal impression of the conference and these presentations.
The plenary speaker, Tom Sudman, attempted to define Knowledge Management whilst making it clear that there are as many different definitions as there are people defining Knowledge Management at the moment. Later speakers raised the possibility that we might not, in fact, be effectively managing knowledge – however that might be defined. Sudman suggested that Knowledge Management is about transferring knowledge and not objects and that Knowledge Management entails adding value to information. He suggested that there is no automatic linear progression that enables information to lead to knowledge, and knowledge to wisdom. Data and information are on different paths to knowledge and wisdom. They may well lead to each other in real or virtual worlds, but this is not automatic. Data and information are artefacts of knowledge, but they are the properties of machines and media. Knowledge and wisdom are always in the human domain. No manager can ensure that information becomes knowledge. Individual human beings make that choice for themselves. This was echoed by a later speaker who recalled the words of T S Eliot in Choruses from “The Rock” when he asked where the wisdom was that has been lost in knowledge, and where the knowledge lost in information. We were also encouraged never to think about knowledge as a dead structure, but always as being something that is in continuous evolution. This is not to say, however, that information scientists cannot take data and information and arrange them in a meaningful way.
He thought that the important elements in Knowledge Management are people, objects, and value. Today that knowledge is frequently mediated through technology and this leads people to believe that knowledge management must involve technology and that technology automatically leads to knowledge management. It is true that technology is a constant of change in today’s world. The fact that reliance upon technology might be a weakness was then, unintentionally, highlighted when the venue’s technology broke down and he was unable to show his slides. We were re-assured that the entire presentation was available on the web, but this raised doubts in my mind as to just how valuable organisation of information, however well organised it might be, was when it was in ‘isolation’. What he had to say would have been far more valuable had we seen the illustrations as he said it than being invited to look at them later. Having the entire presentation available to everyone on the web in a well-structured way would have been a very valuable added bonus, but it should be that – a bonus, an ability to revisit ideas, and not a safety net. It might well have served as a lesson for today - that a simpler, less organised information set and attempts to organise and distribute knowledge might make a greater impact. Most conferences tend to have some technological failure!
He then went on to pick up the point most often made at conferences today and one that was referred to by several later speakers, that people are the most important element in the information world. Indeed, the speakers at the wrap-up sessions pointed to the fact that many abstracts that had suggested that they might be about more technical subjects had actually resulted in papers that could have been more appropriately placed under cultural, behavioural and social headings. The Ethical, Cultural, Social and Behavioural Aspects Track itself did look at many different types of people – individuals, groups and communities in general as well as particular populations such as children, students and engineers. There were papers about physical and ‘virtual’ public, school and academic libraries as well as museums and courts. It was suggested that managing information involved connecting people to each other and connecting people to information. It was not just making lots of information available. This is information management and not knowledge management.
People's information-seeking behaviour was closely examined in a number of reports of research findings. A general consensus appeared to be that people's greatest information-seeking needs were those of being able to find things as easily as possible within a single source that offered access to apparently infinite knowledge, but that this should be an individually customised source. Some papers illustrated the fact that there are many different concepts of users and their needs. Different people have different needs and all needs are valid. During questioning, however, the importance of libraries always meeting all of these needs was debated. It was suggested that some academic libraries might be catering to individual needs too well in the sense that students often expected to find all their information neatly packaged and easily available. Consequently, if the library provided this service, students then found it very difficult to search for themselves and, therefore, trace information for themselves later in life. One paper reported research findings that confirmed many of the impressions that many information scientists have – that, for example, most users are very confident about their searching abilities and that males tend to be more confident than women. But the findings also suggested that, in practice, there were few differences in the actual search abilities of many users. This proved to be true when a range of comparisons were made. There were few differences, for example, between males and females or between computer studies students and non computer studies students. Most worrying was the apparent lack of difference in ability between those who had received help from information professionals and those who had had no library instruction.
Despite the fact that technology had just let him down, Tom Sudman also claimed that there were far more cultural factors than technological elements contributing to the lack of success in knowledge management systems. He thought that the ratios were about 80% to 20%. Before any successful system can be introduced into an institution, it is necessary to gain as deep an understanding as possible of the institution's culture, the project that is being introduced and the demands that it will make upon that culture. Other speakers suggested that problems could arise when people have multiple-needs and usability demands, hold dual roles within an organisation and/or different relationships with all the other stakeholders. It is necessary to take a strategic approach to integrating IT with an organisational mission.
Sudman continued by suggesting that whereas a dialogue-driven process in networks of communities might be put on ‘auto-pilot’, a dialogue-driven process can never be. He concluded that the seat of knowledge is probably dialogue. Later speakers picked up this thought. It was suggested that social needs be incorporated into office needs. Archivists need to examine contexts closely rather than bring ideas about pre-conceived needs to a project and they always need to consider future as well as present needs. It is necessary to be both objective and subjective. Information providers and mediators need to be objective in that they should not impose their own values on subjective thought. They should maintain passivity and a distance, but their systems should be based upon subjective decisions made as a result of becoming more active by encouraging people who will use the service to become involved in its creation.
Many speakers echoed this thought and the important themes that seemed to emerge were those of collaborative work, the need for multi-skilled teams and cultural change. There were a number of papers about the ‘collaborative culture’ with a number of interesting examples to lead us to question just how much collaboration is going on and how useful it is. It is difficult to know how much real collaboration is actually taking place. It is very difficult to actually quantify the percentages of the number of projects in which people are collaborating in an interactive sense and those in which they are ‘collaborating’ in the sense that they are merely working alongside each other. This was only one thread that emerged from a number of papers about perceptional and conceptual issues that led to debates about the relationship of theory to practice. As always, today, thoughts about the divide between the information rich/information poor were voiced and it was suggested that people may be divided not merely by their physical access to resources, but also by their ability to learn the essential skills required to exploit information that they find. Today there is a cultural shift in the digital environment. We have now moved from those debates focusing upon our ability to use digitised information to those that are centred upon how we do use it. Many people use digital sources to automate current systems based upon print sources. Digital information is often not used innovatively to take knowledge further.
Other ‘hot’ topics were based upon intellectual property rights, discussion about the divide between electronic libraries and hybrid libraries, the design and architecture of interfaces. There was a great deal of concern amongst US speakers and delegates about the recent EU Database Directive. Discussion of this led to long exchanges about the possibility of global change research being badly effected if there are too many different rules from too many different countries. It seemed to me that there was some misinformation among delegates in relation to UK copyright laws and Crown Copyright.
There was also a lively discussion around the measurement of effectiveness. It was felt that users are often happy if they can see lots of sources, but that librarians should be more concerned about the resources that their clients use. They need to be both effective and efficient. It is often difficult to identify efficiency in a library because of the wide variety of inputs and outputs.
One speaker brought us all back to earth in this age of self-congratulation about the amount of information that we make available and all the wonderful ways in which we manage, publicise and disseminate it. We were told that ‘we moderns’ as a term was actually first used by a medieval writer. Twelfth century scholars thought of themselves as being very modern and that century saw an increase in writing that led to an explosion of information long before the invention of the printing press or the computer. We are not the first age to experience such a phenomenon.
The 2000 Annual Meeting will be held on 13-16 November 2000 at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, Il.
Christine Dugdale
ResIDe Electronic Library
University of the West of England
Email: Christine.Dugdale@uwe.ac.uk
URL: <http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside/>
Tel: 0117 965 6261 ext 3646
Christine Dugdale manages the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
For citation purposes:
Christine Dugdale, "Knowledge: Creation, Organization and Use",
Exploit Interactive, issue 4, January 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/asis/>
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