::The Rationale

Value-Added Processes

"Technology, important and overwhelming as it is at this moment, is but a means of gathering, storing, manipulating and moving information to people who can make use of it. Our professional responsibility is to understand the technologies and to use them effectively to help people in whatever setting. Without people at the center, we become but another technology-driven vocation."
-Robert S. Taylor
From "For whom we design systems."

Long before the personal computer became a common fixture in libraries, Robert S. Taylor was asking fundamental questions about informatin and information system design. Central to those questions were concerns about people, for as he has said, "It is people, both as individuals and as members of organizations, for whom we design systems." It was his efforts to answer these questions that led him to develop his Value Added Processes Theory for designing information systems.

Although complex, the Value-Added Processes Theory is also a common-sense and flexible model that has been used successfully in business and industry, as well as in libraries. This project examines the challenge of providing comprehensive, almost completely electronic library services to a group of students enrolled in an online education program. Taylor's model is an ideal framework upon which to build a comprehensive network of information systems, resources and services because the design must always answer to the following questions:

• "How do people seek and make use of information?"
  
  The Value-Added Processes Model puts users at the forefront of all decisions about information systems. In developing his model, Taylor also investigated the process of seeking information - again from the user's perspective. He proposed that information seeking occurs along a continuum as a constantly evolving, human process of asking questions. Finally, his theory identified six criteria which people use to direct their information seeking experience and which can pre-determine the outcome.




• "How do we, as information professionals help people become aware of the significant role that information plays in their lives? How can we design systems that will help people resolve problems that are critical to them and, at the same time, enhance the quality of life around them?"
  
  Since their inception, libraries have been developing tools and systems for gathering, storing, manipulating and moving information to those who need it. Technology is merely another tool for performing these same functions and should be seen as such. As a working librarian, Taylor identified ongoing library activities and services that improve the outcome of a user's information seeking activities. Since his model is user-centered, he described these library functions as "adding value", since users will only value what they perceive as benefiting or enabling them to obtain a better result. By grouping the twenty-three indentified values and linking each group with one of the six user criteria for information seeking, Taylor gave librarians a user-centered framework upon which to structure an entire constellation of library services. In 1992, in a speech at the annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Robert Taylor cautioned against allowing our fascination with technology to blind us to the real reason for the technology: our commitment to people. When a library is facing the challenge of assisting remote users with all aspects using the library resources in an almost exclusively electronic format, Taylor's model will keep the focus where it belongs: on the user.




• "What does this person consider as information? What is the information use environment in which this person is functioning?"
  
  This is perhaps the most significant question, as it requires us to consider the user's context in which they are working. In our scenario, we examined the needs of a group of nursing students and the constraints and problems they experience from both the existing information system and their information use environments. The section, "Fact vs. Fiction" details the demographic context in which these students are working.
  
  It is also necessary to consider the nursing profession itself as another context. In our scenario, the students are licensed, working registered nurses who are studying for a bachelor's degree. Nursing is a service-oriented profession. As health care professionals, nurses provide services to all types of people with a wide range of needs and concerns and, to do so, they work with a fair degree of autonomy after having developed deep knowledge and understanding of their field and having mastered complex equipment and procedures - not unlike librarians. Therefore, this is a student population that considers itself to be competent and intelligent. Having experienced success within the nursing profession, this group of students will be apprehensive about "starting over" as novices in learning to use the resources of an academic successfully, especially in this online, electronic format.
  
  The third context for this group of students will be the courses themselves: the assignments, requirements and format. Online courses create and define an information use environment that is often very unfamiliar territory for students such as those in our scenario. Marketing the library's services and resources to the faculty is the first and most important step toward insuring that students become aware of all the resources they need in the formats that they require for the course.
  Finally, there is the context of the health care profession itself and the pressure toward delivering care based upon best-evidence practices and knowledge-based information. No longer confined to large academic medical libraries, knowledge-based medical information is available to all health care providers at the point of care and they are expected to use this information in their work environment. A high degree of information literacy and information seeking competence is becoming a job requirement.




In order to bring people and information together in the best way possible, librarians must be prepared for change. Asking the right questions - in the right way - and creating the right tools can produce powerful solutions. Using Taylor's information theory model, "Value-Added Processes in Information Systems" as the foundation will help insure that the solutions truly serve the people.

[The Story] | The Problem | The Model | [Biography] | The Rationale | The Solution | [Bibliography]