Are Your Clients Data-Intolerant?

摘要

A friend of mine was recently diagnosed as having celiac disease, which means he's gluten-intolerant. (Side note: there's even a t-shirt to raise awareness of celiac disease, with a picture of a goofy-looking yak―a silly-yak―and the motto, "Gluten free. Got a problem with that?") And in one of those odd connections of random thoughts that my brain is prone to, I realized that some clients of mine are similarly intolerant of large quantities of information; true, they don't suffer abdominal distress or anemia, but they do fail to "digest" the information if it's presented in a way that's unfamiliar to them or if it's just overwhelming in terms of amount or breadth. I was puzzling through why some people, like information professionals, have such a high tolerance for being immersed in information and why many of our clients and patrons react to the same immersion by breaking out into the mental equivalent of hives. Then I heard a presentation on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator instrument, and about the relative distribution of various MBTI types among the population and specifically among librarians and library school students. According to the speaker, almost half of library school students are either ISTJ or INTJ. These are Introverts, who are Thinking (as opposed to Feeling) and Judging (as opposed to Perceiving). INTJs are known as decisive, independent, sense-makers, and ISTJs are just-the-facts, thorough, organized people. Two personality types who handle large amounts of information well. (Note that these characteristics are used in a fairly specialized way―IxTJs aren't unfeeling and unable to perceive. It's a description of how they view the world, focus their attention, and take in and process information.)