I could tell many stories about the difficulties of profound technological
\nchange among the professional group I know. For now, I’ll tell two.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first story is very short. At a national conference of library science in
\nthe early 1990’s the organizing committee had run many sessions about the nature
\nof changing technology: what we could possibly expect from it and how to cope
\nwith it. I came upon two of my colleagues who had just come from a session run
\nby an expert in change management. This was not, apparently, a rah-rah session
\nabout how change is good. It was, instead, a sensitive assessment of how the
\ncurrent professional changes were challenging and that we should recognize that
\nchange is difficult. My colleagues’ reactions were that the session was \u00c2\u00b4icky\u00c2\u00aa.
\nThat the whole idea was horrible and that, in fact, the entire conference was
\nan unpleasant waste of time.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
My second story is about another of my colleagues. I worked in a law library.
\nLaw librarians thrive on legal material (stautes and judgements) that are timely,
\ncomplete, and delivered in a flexible manner. One day, around 1995, I discovered
\nthat the judgements of the Supreme Court of Canada were available free on the
\nweb. I reported this to my colleague thinking that she would be pleased with
\nthis new tool available to her. Instead she said that she wouldn’t be using
\nthem as they were full of mistakes and could not be trusted. I was disappointed.
\nI asked where she had heard about this new site and who had found the mistakes.
\nShe replied that she had not heard about this site but that she had heard about
\nthese same Supreme Court judgements on another site (that of a commercial legal
\npublisher) and that it had been reported to her that mistakes were found there.
\nI was flabbergasted. I greatly respected this colleague. She was a senior law
\nlibararian who had taught me a great deal about the trade. I was astonished
\nthat she would write off an entire medium because of an error that had occurred
\nat one time on one site. We both well knew that printed law reports were not
\nperfect and that, on occasion, publishers would have to send out Errata to their
\nsubscribers to paste into a bound volume that contained errors. My colleague
\nhad certainly not written-off all printed law reports because of these errors.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was then that I started to realize the depth of resistance to change that
\none could find even with intelligent, competent professionals. I am certainly
\nnot a change manager but I began to see the power of the threat that the new
\ntools brought by technological change would bring to people who had not invited
\nthis change.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Back to Tech Change and Work<\/a>. Forward to Some Information Theory<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I could tell many stories about the difficulties of profound technological change among the professional group I know. For now, I’ll tell two. \u00c2\u00a0 The first story is very short. At a national conference of library science in the early 1990’s the organizing committee had run many sessions about the nature of changing technology: what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":94,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"withoutbars.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-112","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112\/revisions\/174"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/94"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}