Podcast Series Dives into Public Curators Guide
An examination of the public’s trust in science, and ways to buttress that precious commodity, center a four-part series of podcasts presented by The Authority File. The podcasts focus on a recent guide, The People’s Case for Curators, produced by Sage (the parent of Social Science Space) and the advocacy group Sense about Science.
In episode one, host Bill Mickey interviews Camille Gamboa, associate vice president of corporate communications at Sage, and Tracey Brown, director of Sense about Science, about the origins of the guide and informational ecosystem into which it lands.
As Browne notes, public understanding of science is limited and gusts of unvetted information (even if it’s not actively misinformation) can do great harm. “One of the first conversations we have,” she says, “is that scientific or scholarly information is different to other types of information It’s not like a corporate press release or a political manifesto statement or a piece of marketing. … That in itself is a very important thing to showcase and to talk about.”
Browne and Gamboa then define what a “public-good curator” is, detailing how librarians, research officers, and journalists bring their unique skills into building public trust and understanding of research findings, science in general, and policies that make use of these sources.
The Authority File is a weekly podcast series sponsored by Choice, the publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries, which is itself a division of the American Library Association.
Three more episodes will explore the curators guide, with the third and fourth episodes bringing in Louis Coiffait-Gunn, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, to discuss with Gamboa the obstacles to greater public trust and how information professionals can navigate past these obstacles.
