Captain Cook versus the tadpole - the captain wins hands down

Abstract

In the field of corporate information there is a proliferation of terms and descriptions aimed at designating a wide range of jobs and functions in terms of their being associated with ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’. If information professionals are to ensure that they have a role to play in the corporate information/knowledge scene it is essential that they gain an understanding of who they are, what they are and what they should be doing. Information professionals can also gain further insights by observing those with other duties who also claim that they are working in the information/knowledge field and informing the rest of their profession about what this is likely to portend for the future. One definition of the information professional that is offered is the author’s personal one that it involves working extensively with data to transfer it up the value chain to convert it into knowledge and this is taken as the starting point for a discussion of how and why he moved on from the information industry and ceased to be an information professional. It is argued that the ever-expanding knowledge economy will provide people with opportunities that did not exist until relatively recently. Information professionals can now move away from pure information environments, such as libraries and research teams, and explore hitherto unknown parts of their organizations. The article concludes that, if people are to help themselves to develop as information professionals, and to develop the information profession as a whole, it is necessary for them to seek out groups of other like-minded information professionals who have other approaches to their professions and different ways of defining it.