Brown and Duguid Chpt. 3

In this reading what I focused most on was the idea of how important collective knowledge is. Brown and Duguid's story of the new employee in an isolated office struggling with the technology who's problems cleared up once she was move to a more populated area really stood out to me. When one runs into trouble with technology, or to put it into a library setting, when one runs into an information need of any kind, being able to tap into a shared collection of knowledge is crucial.

In the Human Information Behavior class I took one idea continued to appear. When a person has an everyday life information need, in most cases, they turn first to friends, family or co-workers and ask. (Ever since taking that class I have observed this in my own everyday information seeking behavior) Sometimes they are able to gain a satisfactory answer. Sometimes their immediate circle has not encountered this problem previously and the information seeker must look to other sources.

As was pointed out in the reading, the problem of technology that allows one to work almost anywhere, thus enabling the work from home attempts Brown and Duguid discuss, is that the user is cut off from that collective knowledge generated when groups of people gather. Social Software like blogs, wikis, IM and the others we will discuss in our class can be used to take this collective knowledge online and help to reconnect the user with others to recreate that ability to chat around the water cooler or ask a neighbor for help.

A recent example of this from my own experience is an online friend of mine from LJ posted a question on her blog asking for bibliographic data on the manga art group CLAMP. I saw the question and knew that my library had a manga guide book that would contain that information. During my down time at work I was able to look up and send her the answer to her question. I have also frequently observed blog users ask other users how to perform certain functions like customizing their blog or placing their posts behind LJ-cuts (a function that allows long posts to be collapsed or expanded so as not to take up too much space). This behavior greatly resembles a worker at a desk asking the workers near him if they know how to do "X".

The benefits of social software for creating a virtual shared knowledge collection are great. However, there are limits that need to be addressed. How such knowledge is stored and retrieved for later use is a questions librarians have been grappling with, in one form or another, for a very long time. Also, if your problem is that your computer crashed or your modem won't connect to the Internet then sending out a tweet or posting a help message on your blog won't be easy to accomplish.