00Alexandria

Guest Editorial

National libraries have focused quite properly on the legal deposit of electronic materials, and their efforts are beginning to bear very welcome fruit. They have often been involved in interest­ ing areas of electronic experiment and have de­ veloped innovative hardware and software, which has won admiration. They have, however been conspicuously absent from the debates on the future of scholarly communication, the bat­ tles with publishers over the ownership of copy­ right and the retention of fair use and involve­ ment in the development of such electronic jour­ nal experiments as the Los Alamos Archive, SPARC or Highwire. It is also interesting to note that the most significant cataloguing develop­ ment since AACR2 has been initiated by OCLC and developed as the Dublin Core by a world­ wide informal consortium of enthusiastic indi­ viduals. In other words, national libraries have been absent from the debate on the future nature and description of the national scholarly archive. Indeed, it might be argued thatsuch involvement is both improbable and inappropriate, since the interests of national libraries and in particular university libraries are diametrically opposed in this area. It is not the primary function of a na­ tional library to originate scholarship, while the relationship between a copyright library and publishers is fundamentally different from those libraries whose parent bodies generate intellec­ tual property and which selectively purchase the material they require.

A recent conference held at the British Li­brary sponsored by the Library and Information Commission and the British Council attracted a worldwide audience to discuss the issue of Na­ tional Information Policies. Speakers from or­ ganizations as varied as the World Bank, the European Union and the (US) National Commis­ sion on Library and Information Services con­ firmed the importance of such plans and the cen­ trality of libraries to their development. The in­ volvement and leadership of national libraries in such planning will be crucial to their develop­ ment and to their acceptance by government.

It was Lewis Carroll's Red Queen who claimed it necessary to believe six impossible things before breakfast. In similar vein we now have to believe that the cultural mission, the edu­ cational mission the scholarly mission and the championing of the role of libraries in the na-

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tional strategic planning mission are all manage­ able tasks in an environment where the host ministry has a much more limited responsibility.

Arguably the heyday of the public library system was a century ago when it was seen as the university of the working man or when Karl Marx famously studied in the Round Reading Room of the then BritishMuseum Library. In the last 30 years, as tertiary education has been opened to increasing numbers of the population, that public library educational mission has faded in favour of both recreational and cultural ambi­ tions. While public librarians may again aspire to this mission within an information society, it is less clear that politicians share that ambition. For every country such as Singapore with its care­ fully crafted informationplan involving all types of library, there are several countries such as the UK where government ministries launch i nitia­ tives such as homework clubs or community learning centres which 'forget' that these are roles already quietly and conscientiously performed by public libraries. Attempts to revive the public library system as glorified Internet cafes demon­ strate little more than politicians' baffled incom­ prehension of what libraries and more impor­ tantly librarians are for.

One UK local area of great social deprivation has recently announced a development plan to take it forward into the new millennium. It in­ volves the creation of one thousand new appren­ ticeships in traditional trades such as plumbers, electricians and carpenters. How much better if they could all be given training in information­ related skills! The somewhat quaintly named European Computer Driving Licence (ECOL) has found immediate and popular acceptance in teaching computer skills to a certified level. Li­ brarians look at this somewhat askance and argue that information skills are significantly more im­ portant than learning how to use a word proces­ sor; indeed, the European Consortium of Inno­ vative Universities has had tentative preliminary discussions on creating a European Information Driving Licence as an analogue of the ECOL.

This is not an agenda explored by or adopted by European national libraries. Compare this with the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), which, despite its name, is based around the great national libraries of Europe and shows at its website that its plan for cooperative activity revolves around the creation of a database of hand press books, a worthy aim if one of little relevance to the majority of researchers. On the other hand, the CoBRA+ project (Dale, 1999) of many of the same European national libraries funded by the European Commission does aim to look at a range of issues related to electronic in­ formation in relation to national libraries. After the working party reported on metadata national libraries appear to have seen no need for CoBRA to have any interest in the field, as it is not in current workpages and its website shows a link to a retired member of staff of one of the institu­ tions. It is no doubt simplistic to suggest that these two websites show where the real i nterests of their members lie, but it is not difficult to see in them a cultural rare book agenda which is entirely proper for those libraries but not necessar­ ily a concern for libraries at large.

The role of leader can be both thankless and uncomfortable; it carries with it a permanent burden of criticism from the envious, the ill­ informed and the uninvolved. But the best lead­ ers earn rather than inherit their role. A number of the major national libraries have recently chosen new heads. Their choice of path in response to the impossible agenda described above will be critical to the future of the library profession far beyond t heir national boundaries.