Gestures (mis)interpreted?

As I attempt to extract myself from the apparently infinite amount of thought and theory written on the topic of modernization, industrialization and economic development in the Third World, so that I can actually get on with writing my term paper on the topic, I'm struck by the sheer quantity of it all. It would seem to me that no one person would ever be able to read everything good and pertinent to their areas of interest and expertise!

And it is here then, when my own in-built tendency towards collaboration clashes with the hierarchies built into academia. Upon discovering an article that a colleague would appreciate, my natural tendency would be to forward a copy of it or at least a link to it to the person, with a little note explaining why I think this might be useful to them. As a collaborative tactic, this always seemed appreciated in business, back when I was a working professional in the corporate world.

Yet, as I have discovered, there are a lot of academics, professors and students alike, who take this as an affront to their capacity to cope with the knowledge available to them. No matter how humbly and gently I write that little accompanying note, the responses I get back almost invariably demonstrate that my truly altruistic gesture has been taken as one of three types of apparently deliberate (on my part) insults:

1. Implication/insinuation that the person can't cope on their own without my help, and so outrage ensues.
   
2. Dismissal because they've already read it, of course, why wouldn't they have? (How little I know!)
   
3. Misunderstanding as to why this thing even applies to them, because their area of research isn't that at all (as I would apparently know if I'd paid any attention to them at all).

When this is compounded by my almost Pavlovian desire to share equally with people in all strata of academia, including my own professors in existing and past courses, the resulting state for me as I attempt to decide what to do is one of profound confusion, desire and care.

So as I sit here tonight, reading an amazingly rich and cogent account of modernization, development and aid history and concepts from a rather obscure little Human Geography journal Geografiska Annaler, I am struggling with my own compulsion to send the link to it to my professor and explain why I find it so powerful and necessary. What if he misinterprets my intent?

This, then, is politics of academia that I have to start learning to manage, even in such seemingly simple collegial gestures.