Librarians and Information Technology: Which Is the Tail and Which Is the Dog?

THISARTICLE WILL ARGUE, PERHAPS IN CONTRADICTION to the discussions which precede it, that providing end users with more information does not really address their problems and, in fact, does not even identify them.Users want information in order to do other things, and this means that they must not only have the best information, but also not have it buried in quantities of other information which may be wrong but are more likely to be irrelevant and thereby misleading.Most importantly, our users need some assurance that what they found is the best that could be found.Dealing with these concerns does not require access to more information, it requires a process to sift the chaff from the wheat.Computer programs used by the end user cannot do this, but computer use by qualified information intermediaries on behalf of, and to protect, the end user can.This growth of specialists has been consistent for any field in which both complexity and options have increased, and the suggestion that computers can be programmed to do their own self-filtering effectively is at best naive.Peter Drucker has predicted that the most important profession in the next century will be knowledge workers, and knowledge workers are not the same as computer systems specialists.The most competent ones are likely to be reference librarians using sophisticated hardware and software, tools which the end user does not know how to use.This entire issue of Library Trends deals with knowledge discovery or data mining, a relatively sophisticated application of electronic databases.However, most database use is not wphisticated, particularly through CD-