I Heart Librarians: Liz Lawley on Attention Filters and Networks

I love librarians both literally--I'm married to one--and figuratively: they're whip-smart and tech-savvy, but because they typically work in slow-moving institutions that (by definition) take a long view of our collective information needs, they avoid getting caught up in the latest round of buzzword bingo (and can provide a refreshing dose of reality when its most needed).

So I was eager to hear Elizabeth Lawley speak at a Syndicate session this morning, and she didn't disappoint. Two of her comments really stood out for me. First:

Syndicated subscriptions are an attention filter... There are students of mine, colleagues of mine, who would love to be able to subscribe to my attention filter. 'What is Liz reading?'

The concept of an "attention filter" is a use case I mention almost every time I discuss AttentionTrust, and I suspect Steve Gillmor's session on attention tomorrow will touch on some similar themes. Something implicit in Liz's comment--and something I know Steve will discuss--is the importance of inattention. If I'm interested in knowing what Liz is reading (and I am), I'm just as interested in knowing what she's NOT reading. "Attention filters" will help us find the good stuff and avoid the dreck, using attention data generated by us, our friends and colleagues, and although syndicated subscriptions are moving us in the right direction, we have a long way to go.

Liz was also careful to draw an important distinction between social networks and "attention networks," and she posed a compelling question:

How do we meld attention networks with search?

This becomes a huge question when we start thinking about how "attention filters" might evolve. For example, my blogroll is a simple attention filter that gives you a very general sense of the issues that interest me, but it won't tell you which authors I read the most, let alone which individual posts are most relevant to my interests. A better attention filter will capture a lot more information about who and what I'm reading, but that also means that there will be a lot more data that my friends and colleagues will have to wade through--and that means our search tools are going to have to understand our attention networks.