Picking up on Scott's observation that sometimes decision-making in libraries involves making the best guess we can, I'd like to write up this mini-screed before going out to a late afternoon picnic with friends on a picture-perfect San Francisco day:
Axiom1: In libraries, in relationships--in life--evidence and data are extremely useful aids to decision-making.
Axiom2: But in libraries, in relationships--in life--it will generally be hard to obtain the evidence and data we might want in a timely manner.
Thus, the risk of excessive fealty to Axiom1: Paralysis, the inability to make any kind of decision at all because there is not enough good data to justify it.
Ultimate result of this excessive fealty: Inertia, lethargy, and eventual obsolescence as libraries are mired in the past just as they need to move forward into uncharted territory, despite the paltry evidence for doing so.
My alternative to this bleak scenario: In cases when evidence is scarce, but decisions must be made, rely on the core values of librarianship to guide you. Don't let the evidence chase hold you back, because the values are eternal.
What are these values?: Partnership; collaboration; innovation; service; respect for privacy; "no information problem is too big to be solved."
Obtaining sufficient data/evidence is an ideal to strive for, but it will never really happen and that's a fact, jack. Thank goodness for those guiding values, which can always help us in a pinch.
I like this sort of contorted syllogism you've put together, and it no doubt applies to a variety of management and organizational behavior scenarios. Part of the problem comes with never knowing when an entity has passed that threshold in which one can confidently declare that he or she has obtained enough evidence; another obstacle comes with the fact that evidence, no matter how ironclad and defensible it may be, immediately suffers demotion to subjectivity as soon as it comes into human contact. Knowledge, or awareness, which is the lowest level of thinking in the six-tiered Bloom's Taxonomy, is the only phase in which data remains, to some extent, unspoiled. Comprehension and application (the next two levels of thinking) immediately employ evidence in ways that are ineluctably bound to the internal biases of the user.
Despite this double-edged sword, we cannot succumb to paralysis, as you've acknowledged. My own discipline is hopelessly guilty of misapplication and misconstrual of the correlation between values and evidence, and the result is often paternalism--a sense that some people's values are the ones that are of worth. That is, we as planners have cherry-picked the evidence to support it so we think we've created an airtight argument, while simultaneously disavowing any evidence that challenges or negates or values by seeing it as spurious or even unethical. But if we accounted for both the values drawn from "good" evidence as well as those derived from "bad", we would again suffer paralysis, so we must choose values accordingly and shroud through contextual evidence that endows it with an air of moral certitude, or even objectivity.
Do you have any reading you recommend on the subject? Anything you might have written yourself?
Posted by: Eric | July 28, 2009 at 06:41 PM