Implications For Library and Information Science
The concept of cognitive authority was developed in Library and information science and has attracted a lot of attention in this field. Its importance for this field is related to questions such as: What criteria should be used for selecting information sources? For advising users about selecting information? For interpreting user studies and relevance judgments? All such issues involve questions of cognitive authority and epistemology.
"Perhaps we should learn to be more critical of the very concept of authority. Authority is legitimate only within the boundaries of the community (subject or otherwise) in which it is based. Many questions pertain to areas claimed by competing disciplines, and some to areas beyond the bounds of recognized disciplinary communities. Even when we are able to locate authoritative sources with answer to questions, they tend to be less certain than they look, and greater authority is no guarantee of quality. Authority tells us only that the creators of the source have qualifications and institutional affiliations that match the expectations of a given disciplinary community, not that the source is infallible, or even that its disciplinary community it the best to pursue the information sought" (Pierce, 1991, p. 31).
Read more about this topic: Cognitive Authority
Famous quotes containing the words implications, library, information and/or science:
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn’t.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)
“So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.”
—Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974)