Case Study: A senior information scientist who has been working at the same company for over a decade receives a significant volume of unsolicited mail (and a large number of emails) every day advertising new services or products, meetings and other events.  He has little enough time to improve services for his employer as an information scientist, so he decides to delegate sorting the morning’s mail to his office junior.  However, in doing so he wonders whether he may be abrogating responsibility to monitor new products or services, and whether the office junior is sufficiently competent to identify noteworthy advertisements.

The editors comment...

It is likely that many information professionals will be able to identify with the perceived plight of this information scientist.  Having worked at the same company for a long period he finds that his name has entered practically every online database vendor’s and publisher’s mailing list, a result of which is that he now receives simply too much unsolicited mail that he does not know how to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Arguably he does have a responsibility to keep abreast of professional developments, and this may be interpreted as having to review each of the pieces of junk mail for pertinence.  However, one would expect that a person of such experience would be a member of at least one of the membership organisations in the LIS profession and that he may additionally subscribe to one or more information-related magazines or newsletters.  He ought, therefore, to be able to keep abreast of current developments via those media, so he may decide that it is justifiable not to scan junk mail every day.

On the other hand, by not looking at any of it he may fail to see important commercial or professional information which may not reach the journals or newsletters until much later, if at all.  He is therefore putting himself – and his employer – at a disadvantage by not being aware of important information as soon as it is published.

Whether the office junior is best placed to spot important information is also questioned.  It is true that the information scientist may view the delegation of junk mail scanning as a career development issue, but the volume of unsolicited mail, and the seniority of the information scientist, suggest that the office junior will struggle to take advantage of the mail sorting and may even miss crucial new information which the information scientist would otherwise have spotted.

One could suggest that the information scientist and his team create a daily routine for managing unsolicited mail more systematically, allocating the task of mail selection to subject experts or more senior staff.  Alternatively, the information scientist may have to manage his workload more effectively so as to have the time to review the unsolicited mail himself.

Created: v0.9 27-Nov-05 : JG-T

Revised: v1.0 11-Dec-05 : JG-T.  v1.01 18-Dec-05 : JG-T. v1.02 14-Dec-06 : JG-T.