What is New About Knowledge?

In a blog posting titled "New Knowledge," Helene Blowers wrote on 24 April 2008 in her LibraryBytes blog:

"After just spending the last hour and half working on new presentation about lifelong learning in the 21st century, I opened up my RSS feeds and stumbled across this quote from Robert Steele via Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed:

'Published knowledge is old knowledge: The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledge tailored to a new situation, in real time.'

Wow! There's a lot of food for thought packed into this one statement and it's got me thinking ... how do we build libraries, services, and collections to support "knowledge creation" in real time?"

Norton and I thought at first that there wasn't really anything new here except for the "real time" piece of it. "Published knowledge" has always been a path to the right source(s) that's then used to create new knowledge. When we teach History Day kids how to do research for their projects, we tell them to start with the secondary ("published") sources first. Those sources tell them what's already been discovered by others, what primary sources might be available, what theories or interpretations have been put forward.

The real change here is that this "new knowledge" will be disseminated in real time and others will be able to critique it and use it immediately. Finding that new knowledge and any subsequent worthy uses of it, and making others aware of them and how to find them, will be the challange for librarians. There is already an enormous amount of material on the Internet that libraries are not capturing. How do we "acquire," "catalog," and "provide access" to that wealth of "new knowledge"? Will there eventually be an acquisitions jobber we can all use?

And what about archives? Will this new way of disseminating knowledge make them obsolete? Or should archives be looking at blogs, perhaps, as the modern version of letters, diaries, drafts of manuscripts, etc., and trying to preserve them? Many archives are already worrying about how to save e-mail. Should we be adding blogs to our growing list of electronic documentation that might not get saved any other way unless we find a way to do it?