DESIGNING FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION WORK:

Designing approaches to support knowledge intensive work has been documented to be critical and costly. Research has shown that knowledge workers frequently evaluate such efforts as missing the mark. They are too often left without the help they need for constructing knowledge-based solutions. Knowledge workers point to failures not so much in accessing topically-perfect-information but rather to communication gaps, such as practices and knowledge interactions that do not address work demands and knowing needs in complex, changing, and sometimes elusive situations. This research used an interviewing approach informed by Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The aim was to allow digging deeply to understand hidden depths of knowing practices that rarely have come to light in user studies. The ultimate aim is to design knowledge interactions and practices that support complex knowledge creation anchored to knowledge worker’s knowing practices and to the situationality of these practices. The purpose of this paper is to present an exemplar study focusing on the challenges of doing user research in such a way that it usefully informs the design of knowledge supportive practices and interactions intended for use in complex knowledge creation work in the for-profit context. Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology is presented as an alternative and more powerful approach to studying knowledge creation work in organizational contexts.Designing approaches to support knowledge intensive work has been documented to be critical and costly. Research has shown that knowledge workers frequently evaluate such efforts as missing the mark. They are too often left without the help they need for constructing knowledge-based solutions. Knowledge workers point to failures not so much in accessing topically-perfect-information but rather to communication gaps, such as practices and knowledge interactions that do not address work demands and knowing needs in complex, changing, and sometimes elusive situations. This research used an interviewing approach informed by Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The aim was to allow digging deeply to understand hidden depths of knowing practices that rarely have come to light in user studies. The ultimate aim is to design knowledge interactions and practices that support complex knowledge creation anchored to knowledge worker’s knowing practices and to the situationality of these practices. The purpose of this paper is to present an exemplar study focusing on the challenges of doing user research in such a way that it usefully informs the design of knowledge supportive practices and interactions intended for use in complex knowledge creation work in the for-profit context. Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology is presented as an alternative and more powerful approach to studying knowledge creation work in organizational contexts

DESIGNING FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION WORK:

Designing approaches to support knowledge intensive work has been documented to be critical and costly. Research has shown that knowledge workers frequently evaluate such efforts as missing the mark. They are too often left without the help they need for constructing knowledge-based solutions. Knowledge workers point to failures not so much in accessing topically-perfect-information but rather to communication gaps, such as practices and knowledge interactions that do not address work demands and knowing needs in complex, changing, and sometimes elusive situations. This research used an interviewing approach informed by Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The aim was to allow digging deeply to understand hidden depths of knowing practices that rarely have come to light in user studies. The ultimate aim is to design knowledge interactions and practices that support complex knowledge creation anchored to knowledge worker’s knowing practices and to the situationality of these practices. The purpose of this paper is to present an exemplar study focusing on the challenges of doing user research in such a way that it usefully informs the design of knowledge supportive practices and interactions intended for use in complex knowledge creation work in the for-profit context. Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology is presented as an alternative and more powerful approach to studying knowledge creation work in organizational contexts.Designing approaches to support knowledge intensive work has been documented to be critical and costly. Research has shown that knowledge workers frequently evaluate such efforts as missing the mark. They are too often left without the help they need for constructing knowledge-based solutions. Knowledge workers point to failures not so much in accessing topically-perfect-information but rather to communication gaps, such as practices and knowledge interactions that do not address work demands and knowing needs in complex, changing, and sometimes elusive situations. This research used an interviewing approach informed by Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The aim was to allow digging deeply to understand hidden depths of knowing practices that rarely have come to light in user studies. The ultimate aim is to design knowledge interactions and practices that support complex knowledge creation anchored to knowledge worker’s knowing practices and to the situationality of these practices. The purpose of this paper is to present an exemplar study focusing on the challenges of doing user research in such a way that it usefully informs the design of knowledge supportive practices and interactions intended for use in complex knowledge creation work in the for-profit context. Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology is presented as an alternative and more powerful approach to studying knowledge creation work in organizational contexts

Reports of the demise of the "user" have been greatly exaggerated: Dervin's sense-making and the methodological resuscitation of the user – looking backwards, looking forward

In 2003, an ASIST panel (Rosenbaum, Davenport, Lieuvrouw, Day, 2003) pronounced the "death of the user" suggesting that new technologies undermine a concept that was already weak in ability to account for agency in information seeking and use. This panel challenges that pronouncement by addressing how methodological approaches have created users in different manifestations – emotional, cognitive, physical, and social – elusive and capricious, dead or almost so, overly demanding, disinterested, individualistic, materialistic, culture-bound, active, passive…. Panelists zero in on how they have used and struggled with Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (Dervin & Foreman-Wernet, 2003) in attempts to conduct parsimonious, heuristic, and useful user studies and to introduce a strong user-orientation into LIS pedagogy and practice. Starting with the seminal Dervin & Nilan (1986) ARIST review of information seeking and use studies, Dervin's Sense-Making has been pointed to as sparking the turn toward user-oriented studies of information seeking and use (e.g., Savolainen, 1993). Sense-Making has been much quoted and misquoted, praised and criticized, implemented and co-opted. This panel will look backwards and forward using Sense-Making as an exemplar and foil for considering the ways philosophies that drive methodologies and methods that implement them enlarge or diminish our conceptions of the user.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/49322/1/1450420159_ftp.pd

Information-Seeking Behavior of Clergy: The Research, the Results, and the Future

This article reviews the information seeking behaviors of clergy

Facilitating Pupil Thinking About Information Literacy

Whilst information literacy is frequently taught through the imposition on learners of an established framework, this paper suggests a different approach by taking a lead from James Herring’s ideas. Specifically, it provides guidance to school-based information professionals who would like to encourage their pupils to devise their own flexible, information literacy models which are unique to them. Drawing on existing material in information science and wider thought, it proposes areas for coverage and considers how information professionals may support the dynamic process of model construction. It is recommended that those who are intent on facilitating the creation of personal information literacy models help pupils to identify the roles they take on in their lives, to reflect on the information needs that result, to ascertain the information they require in particular situations, to explore their information-seeking activities, to consider means by which information can be captured and to give thought as to how the information they have accessed may be used. This framework is, however, by no means rigid and readers are, of course, free to make their own adjustments

Being user-oriented: convergences, divergences, and the potentials for systematic dialogue between disciplines and between researchers, designers, and providers

The challenge this panel addresses is drawn from intersecting literature reviews and critical commentaries focusing on: 1) user studies in multiple fields; and 2) the difficulties of bringing different disciplines and perspectives to bear on user‐oriented research, design, and practice. 1 The challenge is that while we have made some progress in collaborative work, we have some distance to go to become user‐oriented in inter‐disciplinary and inter‐perspective ways. The varieties of our approaches and solutions are, as some observers suggest, an increasing cacophony. One major difficulty is that most discussions are solution‐oriented, offering arguments of this sort ‐‐ if only we addressed users in this way… Each solution becomes yet another addition to the cacophony. This panel implements a central approach documented for its utility by communication researchers and long used by communication mediators and negotiators ‐‐ that of focusing not on communication but rather on meta‐communication: communicating about communication. The intent in the context of this panel is to help us refocus attention from too frequent polarizations between alternative solutions to the possibility of coming to understand what is behind the alternatives and where they point to experientially‐based convergences and divergences, both of which might potentially contribute to synergies. The background project for this panel comes from a series of in‐depth interviews with expert researchers, designers, and providers in three field groupings ‐‐ library and information science; human computer interaction/information technology; and communication and media studies. One set of interviews involved 5‐hour focus groups with directors of academic and public libraries serving 44 colleges and universities in central Ohio; the second involved one‐on‐one interviews averaging 50 minutes with 81 nationally‐internationally known experts in the 3 fields, 25‐27 interviews per field. Using Dervin\u27s Sense‐Making Methodological approach to interviewing, the expert interviews of both kinds asked each interviewee: what he/she considered to be the big unanswered questions about users and what explained why the questions have not been answered; and, what he/she saw as hindering versus helping in attempts to communicate about users across disciplinary and perspective gaps. 2 The panel consists of six teams, two from each field. Prior to the panel presentation at ASIST, each team will have read the set of interviews and completed impressionistic essays of what patterns and themes they saw as emerging. At this stage, team members will purposively not homogenize their differences and most will write solo‐authored essays that will be placed on a web‐site accessible to ASIST members prior to the November meeting. In addition, at least one systematic analysis will be completed and available online. 3 At the ASIST panel, each team\u27s leader will present a brief and intentionally provocative impressionist account of what his/her team came to understand about our struggles communicating across fields and perspectives about users. Again, each team will purposively not homogenize its own differences in viewpoints, but rather highlight them as fodder for discussion. A major purpose will be to invite audience members to join the panel in discussion. At least 20 minutes will be left open for this purpose

The Research-Action-Teaching Effort at Syracuse University's School Of Library Science

This paper gives a very brief overview of the kinds of activities which are going on at Syracuse University which relate to information referral projects. The School of Library Science is involved in a multi -dimensional effort which focuses on the information needs of minorities and the disadvantaged through research action and research teaching. For the past several years , the school has been undergoing a major refocusing of its approach. A great deal of emphasis is being placed on the "people" aspects of librarians hip. The clearest manifestation of this change is the fact that the school now has four social scientists on its faculty of fifteen members. In addition, the school is now in its third year of offering a social science-oriented doctoral program emphasizing the problems of information transfer. The following discussion briefly describes the kinds of activities the Syracuse School of Library Science is involved in and some of the insights they have provided.published or submitted for publicatio