Servicio de información
2. El servicio prestado por el departamento de información bien sea por correo, teléfono o personalmente.
Massa de Gil, Beatriz; Trautman, Ray; Goy, Peter. 1964. Diccionario técnico de biblioteconomía. México: Editorial Trillas. Pág. 178
A service provided by, or for, a special library which draws attention to information possessed in the library or information department in anticipation of demand; this is done by preparing and circulating news sheets, literature surveys, reading lists, abstracts, particulars of articles in current periodicals, etc. which it is anticipated will be of interest to potential users of the service.
Montague, Leonard. 1971. The librarian’s glossary of terms used in librarianship and the books crafts and reference book. England: The Trinty Press. Pág. 330
Es obligado al abordar el tema de los servicios de información referirse de nuevo a las necesidades de los usuarios que se suponen bien interpretadas por el personal especializado que atiende a dichos servicios, interpretación que si es correcta debería poder suplir los defectos de expresión que muchos usuarios experimentan a la hora de exteriorizar aquello por lo que están interesados o acaso preocupados.
El servicio de información trata de facilitar máximamente el flujo de información que las técnicas documentales se proponen como uno de sus primeros objetivos. Un servicio de información ideal debería garantizar que la información fluya a todos los niveles de una determinada organización, que se transmitida hacia arriba y hacia abajo con igual facilidad y que sea exportada horizontalmente a todos los departamentos y divisiones de la empresa tanto propios como extraños.
La mayor ventaja de un servicio de información es que pueda encontrar las respuestas a una determinada pregunta más rápidamente de lo que el preguntante la encontraría por sí mismo.
Empleo el vocablo “servicio de información” por ser el más usual y porque los anglosajones que son quienes hasta ahora se encargan de patentar la mayoría de conceptos en nuestra disciplina sienten especial alergia a usar el término Documentación, aunque luego a la hora de precisar sus objetivos (los del servicio) y aun para definirlos echan mano de vocablos típicamente documentales y exclusivos de la Documentación.
Coll-Vinent, Roberto. 1984. Ciencia documental: principios y sistemas. Pág. 141
Service: An activity helpful in acquiring, processing or transmitting information and data or in providing an information product. For example, a courier, computer programming or information locating or delivery service. The activity usually involves people who provide customized assistance.
Burk, Cornelius y Horton, Forest. 1988. Infomap: a complete guide to discovering corporate information resources. United States of America: Prentice Hall. Pág. 47
The theory and practice of providing services that link information seekers to information source. Providing an information service calls for information specialists, such as librarians, to act as intermediaries. These specialists will offer services on both a self-service and a staff-assisted basis. They will also provide whatever other services are required to support the information services are required to support the information services, for example stock selection. Such services are often referred to as indirect services; information services as direct ones.
Clearly the range and emphasis of the information service offered will depend on the type of service provider, e.g. public library. But the services provided by all kinds of institutions will aim to make information flow from sources to seekers. If the services were not provided, the flow would either never place or take place inefficiently.
Information service is concerned with users (actual or potential) and their needs. It is concerned with the utilization of resources. This means for a library both its own stock and what is available to is from elsewhere, from instance through computer networks. It is concerned with the education and training of information specialists. Above all it is concerned with establishing and running a full range of quality services.
Library-based information service came into existence as a result of the accelerating growth of scientific and industrial research, both in Europe and the United States, at the start of the twentieth century. To aid the research, it was necessary not only for subject literature to be made available to researches, but also for the information in this literature to be brought to their attention. Library services had not set out to do this before. During the first half of the twentieth century information services became well established in both government and industrial research institutions and were found to a lesser extent in the field of business information. The nature and range of the service by the 1950s can be seen in Foskett’s (1958) important book on the subject. Since the 1950s information service has continued to develop. One notable area in which it has continued to develop.
The term information service (sometimes called information reference and information service) is a narrower term than library services and users services. It is used to refer in the main to services which emphasize four characteristics: subject knowledge, user-friendliness, dynamic (or proactive) service and personal service.
Originally the phrase information service was used almost exclusively in a library context to refer to special library services. The services offered by such libraries have always had the four characteristics. Subject knowledge is needed because special libraries usually relate to specialized subject area and the staff need to have subject expertise. For this reason, they may call themselves information officers rather than librarians. User-friendliness is desirable because these libraries are often small and can be run informally, but also because they are concerned with stock utilization rather than stock preservation. The dynamic nature of special library services is especially seen in the emphasis they give to the dissemination of information. Services such as the production of current awareness bulletins aim to give information seekers what they want to know (or resources they ought to know) before they come and ask for the information or the sources.
Whilst many dissemination of information services are aimed at users as a whole, some are aimed at the requirements of individual users. These are known as SDI services (selective dissemination of information). The personal service characteristic is, then, clearly found in SDI services. Of course, another service libraries offer on a personal basis is the answering of enquiries. Enquiry work and dissemination of information are services at the heart of information service generally. Enquiry work, though like dissemination of information in being a personal service, differs basically from it in that it is a responsive and not a dynamic form of service. The information seekers, not the information specialist, initiates the services encounter. Enquiry work is closely linked to the subject of information retrieval and involves literature searches. Enquiry work in libraries other than special libraries has traditionally been associated with reference work, and in public libraries with reference departments. Lending departments are most associated with document supply services. These services should be considered an area of information service as supplying documents for reference or lending, including photocopies etc., results in the communication of information enquiry work and document supply, a further main branch of information service exists. It is user education. This is specially important in academic libraries, and education in how to use libraries and otherwise seek information may be built into students’ studies.
Feather, John; Sturges, Paul. 1997. International encyclopedia of information and library science. Great Britain: Routledge. Pág. 217
Conversation theory details the iterative process by which we know things. It is worth noting that I use “knowledge” throughout this Atlas as a noun. It is a convention that is hard for me to break. However, Pask only uses the verb “know” or gerund “knowing”. He would say that how we know something is determined in conversation. Knowing is dynamic and changing. Although I use “knowledge,” the same must be understood – knowledge is what we do and why we do it, not something that can be boxed up, transferred or archived. It is also in constant flux as we encounter new situations and new interactions.
So how do we come to know things? What is dynamic? Knowledge as a process in relation to one another through a memory that is derived from language exchange between conversants. See – perfectly clear.
OK, a bit dense and in need of unpacking. Let’s look at knowledge as a process. Two people (or organizations, societies, or even parts of oneself) engage in a back-and-forth dialog over time.
What they are exchanging is language. It may be spoken language or nonverbal. With each interaction, both parties are trying to come to an agreement about something (the time of day, the weather, the politics). Also, there is persistence to this conversation over time – that is, the conversants remember what they just said. Piece of cake, right? It seems practically intuitive. Except, of course, in its application. What do I mean that someone can converse with themselves? How does this lead to anything like knowledge and not just idle chitchat? What if the agreement they come up with is just plain wrong? For this, let’s dive into the elements of Conversation Theory at much greater depth: conversants, language, agreements and memory.
Conversation theory > conversants > service is not invisibility
Lankes, David. 2014. The Atlas of new librarianship. Singapore: The MIT Press. Pág. 32
Service is not invisibility. Before we jump to other aspects of conversation theory, it is worth a quick pause here to talk about one important implication of conversants. It takes at least two conversants to make a conversation. Each conversant plays a part and has a voice that guides the conversation.
This means that in, say a reference interview, the librarian is not invisible or somehow neutral. He or she plays an active role in that conversation. The library, in a debate about how a community defines good and bad information, needs to be part of that conservation to have a voice.
Put simply: to be of service in building knowledge means to have a voice and be active in shaping that conversation. To be active is not to be invisible.
Lankes, David. 2014. The Atlas of new librarianship. Singapore: The MIT Press. Pág. 33
Information services are people and organizations that have services to share. You may say that you have information to share as well, but in fact all you ever share is a service. Access to information is a service; the organization of resources is a service; the search, maintenance, and persistence of information is a service. It is impossible to separate out information from service. Let me demonstrate this through an example.
The national science foundation has funded digital library research since the early 1990s. At first they funded more basic research on technologies such as speech to text, video indexing, image retrieval and large-scale computing. In the wanted to show how digital libraries could make a direct impact on the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (the so-called STEM discipline). They launched the National Science Digital Library, NSDL) program to build a national resource STEM education.
The plan for the library shows a distinct artifact-centric view (in this case, the artifacts were primarily born digital web resources).
The NSDL was to consist of collection, services and a core integration service to bring it all together (primarily through harvested metadata collections).
So the collections would make available three-dimensional models of chemicals, weather simulations, lesson plans and so on. Services would busily write code for searching the collections, answering questions posed to scientists and using information visualization for complex mathematics. The core integration group would then tie this all together to make it look like one seamless library.
Lankes, David. 2014. The Atlas of new librarianship. Singapore: The MIT Press. Pág. 88
The library tradition in the humanities is long and strong. Library directors used to be historians and textual scholars. This relationship has been strained over the past decades as librarianship as a discipline began crafting itself as a social science. The increased focus on services and crafting itself as a social science. The increased focus on service and digital resources has been met with resistance from humanities scholars as they see it as a diminished focus on their core scholarly materials.
Yet much of humanities studies are dedicated to an ongoing conversation about what it is to be human and the nature of our cultural heritage. Humanities scholars understand the idea of the society as a grand conversation taking place over all of human history. Further they understand this at a deeper and much more complex level than the social or physical sciences. Indeed, it is from the humanities that the idea of postmodernism emerged.
Lankes, David. 2014. The Atlas of new librarianship. Singapore: The MIT Press. Pág. 176
Information service is the process of resolving information needs of users in response to a particular question, interest, assignment, or problem and building positive relationships with users. The reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association defines reference transactions, sometimes referred to as reference service, as “information consultations in which library staff recommend, interpret, evaluate, and/or use information resources to help others to meet particular information needs”. These reference transactions can take place in person, on the telephone, or virtually via e-mail, chat reference, instant messaging, social media, or video conferencing. Librarians are also creating websites, answer archives, and links to “frequently asked questions” – all of which are designed to anticipate user questions and help people independently find information. Traditional reference desk service continues to be highly valued by library users in many settings, but newer forms of virtual communication such as e-mail, chat reference and texting have become extremely popular. Consequently, it is all the more important for librarians to understand the range of inquiries that can be expected, allowing them to provide a full and ready answer, regardless of the form through which the query arises or through which the answer is delivered.
Cassell, Kay; Hiremath, Uma. 2018. Reference and information services: an introduction. United States of America: American library association. Pág. 26
