The following is an example of my academic writing for a midterm essay. I earned
92% with this essay.
For this midterm, please describe the development of a form of recorded textual knowledge from its creation to its distribution and use. Please describe this information object's audience, how it is distributed, where it is located and acquired and how this may have changed from the mid-Twentieth Century. Please also describe the work of knowledge mediators (library professionals) in connecting the information object with its intended audience.
Recorded Textual Knowledge I have chosen a medical textbook as an example of textual knowledge. At mid-Twentieth century the information container (in the parlance of library science, it would take the form of a folio book produced by a textbook publisher specialized in medical textbooks. The content would feature state-of-the-art pictorial representations of human anatomy and physiology and expert descriptions of the body and its component parts. In the 1950s the state of the art would be print reproductions of photographs and specialized hyper-realistic illustrations sometimes rendered in color.
As of academic year 2013 all students at U of A’s medical school get an iPad with admission, so it would be fair to assume that the trajectory of medical textbooks is headed in the direction of many mainstream medical journals and going purely digital. Instead of print on paper, these emerging textbooks’ information container is an eBook reader of some kind.
The eBook ‘s information content exists as digital information, possibly a PDF or mobi format mediated on a digital reader, be it a laptop or tablet computer. Instead of rotogravure processed photographs, modern medical texts feature very high-resolution digital images of the human body.
Source: Creation Production, Distribution and their technologies:
Medical textbooks are a high overhead production. They are written by authorities in the field of medicine and medical education, usually physicians or physician educators.
Publication of medical textbooks “Require high costs of investment in technology and the levels of investment required to secure large adoptions in the schoolbook and college textbook markets” (Thompson, Books in the Digital Age p.60).
In mid century physical books were distributed and book distribution was a whole facet of the print trade. Now books are distributed online and anyone with a connection can download the digital equivalent of a textbook if they have a live data connection.
The audience for medical textbooks is medical students. This is a very small niche market compared to say a publisher of romance novels or celebrity biographies. They are young adults who have committed to going to med school after getting a bachelors degree in a pre-med field. They are professionals in training and have a high aptitude for technology. In the mid century they would have a level of research knowledge of a college graduate.

Currently they would be adept at handling a laptop or tablet computer capable of rendering ePublications readable by humans.
Location and acquisition: Medical textbooks were not generally sold through normal trade retail and are not subject to whims of the market like retail booksellers. However there has been consolidation in textbook publishing just as there has been with mainstream trade publishing. Pearson and Thompson are both huge publishers focused on textbooks and were mentioned in Thompson’s Books in the Digital Age. (p.55) These two book publishers along with scholarly journal publisher Elsevier (now part of Reed Elsevier) are the three largest publishers in the entire industry (p.58) and Pearson is listed as the number one most consolidated publishing group in 2002 (P.59) In the field of educational and professional publishing, the trend toward consolidation has imitated that of general trade publishing where three out of the top five educational publishers are large international corporations. Some medical textbook publishers are university publishers and are nonprofit businesses and therefore are immune to market forces. (p.61)
Textbooks are generally available at college bookstores on campus (an educational institution per slide 6 in “The Changing Information Landscape”) or adjacent to campus.
There has been somewhat of a race for publishers to try to squeeze profitability out of the textbook market. An old favorite among students is new editions, which make earlier editions obsolete and therefore no longer available as used books. Textbook sellers have seemed to escape the consolidation of general booksellers
Information Mediator work: In this case a librarian in a medical school library would be an example of an information mediator in the midcentury model of medical textbooks.
Medical students are expected to purchase their textbooks, but there are many who might rely on their medical library, especially for reserve copies, which could be rare or very costly books.
Knowledge and skills for information mediation: Medical librarians. They seem to be mostly librarians and specialized ones in medical libraries, I have only met one who was professionally trained and certified in the medical field, a nurse who was studying to be a librarian and transitioning entirely to library science, otherwise staff at the medical library where I work are entirely specialized librarians with many decades of experience in library work and medical libraries in particular. Medical librarians I have worked with have great search techniques mastered in the realm of querying databases such as Web of Science and
Web of Medicine as well as journal databases like PubMed.