The New Information Professional: How to Thrive in the Information Age Doing What You Love

Citation

du Preez, M. (2006), "The New Information Professional: How to Thrive in the Information Age Doing What You Love", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 112-114. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610649326

Sue Myburgh's The New Information Professional is a fascinating book on the information profession, the paradigm shift it is experiencing and the role of the new information professional (IP). It takes a theoretical and rather philosophical approach to the subject, making it a very special contribution to the professional literature.

In the preface, Myburgh notes that though information communication technologies (ICTs) have fundamentally changed the three basic pillars upon which the information professions rest (that is the containers of information, the means by which they can be communicated and the tools used to manage them), the traditional information professionals (TIPs) have kept on concentrating on document management instead of the management of information.

TIPs might be coming to the end of the world as they know it (Chapter 1), but this closing also provides an opportunity for radical reassessment and redefinition – a process that will probably be necessary for some time.

What is information work, and who are the information professionals? These questions are answered in Chapter 2 when Myburgh discusses some definitions in an attempt to clarify the anomalies and differences in the understanding of what information management is and how it is practised.

The TIP paradigm and habitus is examined in Chapter 3 while Chapter 4 takes a closer look at the changing context or environment in which the TIP has to practice his/her profession. It indicates how these changes require new ways of doing things, new approaches to problem‐solving and even new ways of thinking.

Chapter 6 arrives at a possible Kuhnian paradigm shift and identifies the following anomalies that need to be investigated:

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  information professionals do not manage information and neither do they explore the role of information in society;

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  information work is considered a social science and its praxis is located substantially in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS);

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  scientific tradition in information retrieval;

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  the information professional view of the organisation of knowledge is document‐related and hegemonic;

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  access is not enough;

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  increased fragmentation between and among the information professional leads to misunderstanding of their role; and

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  model of education for the information professionals.

In conclusion, the chapter reflects on whether these anomalies could survive.

It is necessary to distinguish between the information professions and possibly to arrive at a new multidisciplinary metacommunity of information professionals (Chapter 7). The core knowledge that is needed for an information meta‐discipline is looked at in Chapter 8 and makes it possible to determine what the new information professional looks like (Chapter 9). Some discussion is given to the aims and competencies of the new information professional and some possible careers are highlighted. An appendix indicating what organisations wants from information professionals, a bibliography and a useful index concludes the volume.

The New Information Professional is a very valuable book in a time when the traditional information professional is experiencing career pressure and uncertainty in the move from traditional libraries where documents are organised to the hybrid or digital libraries where access to information is provided. It most certainly offers a lot of food for thought and can be recommended to all academics and other persons interested in the role and place of the information professional.