Fiefdoms of Expertise

The phrase "a place for everything, everything in its place" is attributed to Benjamin Franklin.  Lately I've noticed how often people slot themselves into narrowly defined fields of expertise, assuming that we cannot contribute meaningfully in any other sphere because it is not our "area."  We define our "place," and assume that everyone else fits in another place that we cannot access without the requisite background.  Franklin's endorsement of this idea is both ironic and distressing, given the fact that he was a talented diplomat, writer, and businessman (and ladies man too, or so legend has it.)

Some cases in point of such narrowcasting, personally and professionally:

1. Personally--Yesterday I went to lunch with Helen and some other business school students. One other non-business school student is there; he's a graduate student at UC Irvine. Last week he attended a talk by a recent Nobel Prize winner (not Al Gore), even though the prize recipient was not "in my field." Another member of our lunch party asked why he went to the talk, given the fact that it was from someone in a different field.  The first person responded that it was close enough to his field--his "place," his area of expertise--that he could still get something out of it. But otherwise he would not have attended.

2. Professionally--In health sciences libraries, PubMed is the premiere journal literature database. All librarians should be  able to search it, and teach others how to do so. But PubMed is just one part of a much broader suite of databases, called Entrez. PubMed points to articles, but Entrez points to the nucleotide sequences and genetic marker databanks that underlie many of the findings in the articles.

When you speak about Entrez to most health sciences librarians--myself included--you elicit nervous reactions because most people have no idea what you'll find there. It's much easier to retreat to the comfort zone of looking exclusively for published articles...that is our place. Let's let somebody else--somebody "in another field"--tell you all about Entrez.

What's the problem with this approach?  Journal articles are increasingly becoming artifacts of scholarly work, the final record of an intellectual effort that takes place in more fluid and dynamic databases (like the rest of Entrez besides PubMed.)  PubMed is not the beginning and the end of biomedical literature searching. We have to expand "our place" to maintain vital.

Rebuttal: It takes a great deal of knowledge to know what's happening in Entrez (or being discussed at that Nobel Prize lecture). Unlike reading a journal citation, you can't just pull up a record from an Entrez database and know what's happening--this material is complex, and requires an understanding of molecular biology. We shouldn't be jacks of all trades and masters of none.

Fair enough. Obviously background knowledge and expertise matters. For example, it would be nice if librarians who discuss the economics of publishing had a firm grasp on core economic principles (something MarkD has been saying for a while.) 

My point is not that everyone should know everything, or that we should all be able to teach any topic under the sun after reading about it for a few minutes on Wikipedia. The point is that we shouldn't think of ourselves too restrictively--I do this, you do that, and the person in the next office does something else that neither of us knows anything about. This is how silos of knowledge and fiefdoms of expertise form in an organization, potentially leaving the whole as less than the sum of its parts.

We can't all be experts across the board; that's true. But we should always be trying to expand the comfortable boundaries of our "place."

Comments

[jcrespo]

Hi Marcus, great post. The whole issue of PubMed/Entrez and our areas of expertise has intrigued and worried me for some time and I think you've captured part of what concerns me.

As repositories of expertise our libraries should have librarians(?) who are skilled users of the Entrez suite beyond PubMed. Those experts should be sharing that knowledge with their colleagues to raise that library's overall expertise. This area of skill building really needs work in our profession.

(?) And it may not necessarily be a librarian who's the expert and skill-builder of other librarians at the library.

AndI join you in being a non-expert/almost-novice in Entrez.