Remodelling library education after medical eduation

At an ASIST student meeting we are talking about how we can better integrate library practice with research. The issue of library education being separated from the pracitce was also discussed.

One person raised the issue of having library education being modelled after medical education. Doctors who teach are situated in hospitals and their students have days that they walk around with their teachers and get to apply what they learn.

Why not have library educators situated in libraries, and have some teaching days where students are actually spending time doing work in the actual library?

Brief update on my immature thesis idea

Just providing a brief update on my messy thesis concept. Right now it has evolved into the idea of using folkloric artificial intelligent conversational agents for transmitting business information for micro-enterprise owners.

 For the summer, I am hoping to look at literature on folklore being used to convey business information and/or use in online information services. By folklore - I am narrowing down to the use of folkloric storytelling and proverbs as well as the role of natural conversation in using these methods to convey information to micro-enterprise owners.

Also looking for theory to support this perspective. Thoughts, suggestions, or literature welcomed.

Preliminary thoughts on creating a chatbot to answer business questions from Jamaican government online sources

I am currently exploring the process of creating a chatbot for information provision, with view to apply it to my thesis and secondly to discuss its application to libraries in providing a new small business online information service.

So far, I am basing the chatbot as a question answering interface to Government documents for business users. My hope is to create the interface to answer questions by users regarding a Government process. In a sense, this moves into e-governance and the access to e-government information/ or simply the access to information.

So far, one of the issues that I have come across is the issue of updates. When basing the information for a business query on a government online source, in the case that I am doing, the particular Jamaican government agency has had a name change. Since the old/former name is in the document that I am attempting to use to feed my chatbot, one wonders when last the site was updated and how this could be a liability to libraries providing this service.

Stay tuned within the next few weeks for more on this matter.