98 HLR Editorial

Health Libraries Review 1998, 15, 77—79

Editorial

DEREK LAW King's college London, strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

It is fashionable to rail against JANET for its inhospitability to non-higher education users. The arguments for this are well understood and may even have some justice, but many people, including many in higher education, find the exclusive stance difficult to accept. However, the convenience of JANET as a whipping boy blinds us to the general arrogance of system managers. A recent e-mail to me from a colleague stated, 'Of course we all agree that NHS concerns about security of patient data are justified and that reciprocity on the NHSnet part cannot be expected'. And yet it is not, at least to me, self-evident that the addresses of political refugees, student examination marks, staff salaries, personal data from research surveys or personal e-mails are any less in need of security. JANET is an open network, which places its security and firewalls at the sewer level not at the network level. Security decisions are a matter of choice, not incontrovertible and ineluctable logic, and we are left faced with a situation much more akin to the world of the obnoxious twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee who agreed to fight, 'For Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoiled his nice new rattle'. Network managers need to be placed in the spotlight and their rather curious assumptions questioned. Heads need to be banged together, if not yet chopped off.

We also need to be alive to the issues and opportunities offered by networks. Many of the problems are to do with data licensing rather than networks, and the attitudes of publishers also need constantly to be exposed to the light. From that perspective three hearty cheers are due to CHEST for their breakthrough deal for cross-sectoral licensing, which allows medical libraries to offer the same service to both NHS and health education users for some datasets. That said there is often a discouraging tendency on the part of some colleagues to seek comfort blankets from others in the form of black and white decisions on usage, rather than seeking to bend and extend rules. John F. Kennedy need not be the only one whose guiding motto was that it is better to seek forgiveness than permission.

Two major developments offer the prospect of improvement. The first comes with a still new Government, apparently alive to the possibility of networks. We are (or may be) faced with the prospect of a People's Network for public libraries, the National Grid for Learning, a network for the University for Industry, SUPERJANET and NHSnet. The argument then to be made to the Government by bodies such as the Libraries and Information Commission is that we can do five things rather averagely or create one world-class superhighway for the UK Only turf wars between Government departments seem likely to prevent this. The other development, which is only just dawning on most people's consciousness, is Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs). The MANs have a quite different set of 'acceptable use guidelines' from JANET and are at least potentially much more hospitable to cross-sectoral use. Thus far the MANs have been implemented by the same technocrats who police the JANET rules, and most of them have shown little appetite

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for cross-sectoral innovation and experiment. Again the opportunity exists for significant joint development of services at the local level.

This issue of Health Libraries Review is as eclectic in its contents as ever, although a number of threads link articles through themes which should concern us all. The issue begins with a review of the recent flurry of NHS White Papers. For the last year since the election it has sometimes seemed that anyone who was anyone was either chairing a review, sitting on a review or giving evidence to a review. As these reviews become reports, Green and White Papers, we are close to seeing just how many parsnips the Government intends to butter. Jane Mackenzie's review is encouraging. As usual information services are not mentioned, but the importance of information is recognized, as is the critical need for support staff to be seen as central to patient care.

Possibly our best-known and highest rated library school is at the University of Sheffield. Sheffield University is also the base of Suzy Paisley, whose research unit is in the School of Health and has an information resources section which is seizing the opportunities to make information central to decision-making, as recent White Papers have suggested. Again the interplay of information, decision-making and novel structures is clearly demonstrated.

This is followed by an analysis of a major survey of attitudes to LIS education. It reveals a depressingly large gap between the Library Schools and the profession and calls for the setting-up of a forum to begin to address the issues. There is a need for that to be as broadly based as possible. One of the uncomfortable facts of the last Research Assessment Exercise was that the LIS Panel had to consider more submissions from outside the traditional LIS sector than in it. There must be a strong chance that in the next Research Assessment Exercise there will be no LIS Panel and that library schools will have to submit to an information systems grouping. Not all those in medical libraries may have noticed the significance of the provision of bursaries and grants for library schools being transferred from the Department of Employment and Education to the British Academy, but that transfer makes it increasingly clear that information professionals are being taught in a wide and varied range of institutions and departments beyond the traditional library schools.

Susan Martin reflects on user education for nurses. Many (most?) librarians offer user education courses and some undertake formal service teaching on academic courses. Now that we are to have the Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT) proposed by Sir Ron Dearing, what impact will it have on professional education? Will all those undertaking service teaching require accreditation? Will the even larger group offering user instruction also require accreditation? Should we be lobbying for information management skills to be part of all accreditation progammes for academic staff? Do progammes such as Netskills have anything to offer here? Will work such as Martin's be helped or hindered by the ILT? All of this reinforces the need for the proposed forum to be wide-ranging in both its ambitions and membership.

Thus we come full circle to JANET and reports on Internet experiments and an impassioned plea for equal access rather than special needs. Almost in passing the slowness of Internet response is mentioned. It is only just becoming clear that in its

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present state the Internet has substantial and fundamental flaws in topology, in standards, in search engines and in data architectures. There is an argument to suggest that we would do much better with an information strategy that concentrated on information resources based in the UK and used Intranets and MANs as our preferred routes to source information. The regions and nation states of the UK appear to be more fashionable as bases for initiatives than the national level, and it may be that we can make more progress on interoperability at that level than at NHS and HEFCE level. Interestingly, Australian Vice-Chancellors have just introduced a charging structure in which hits on Australian Web pages are charged at half the rate of hits on non-Australian sources. Perhaps we can try to persuade Government that in the real world, linking our networks and their data is a much greater prize than seeking sponsors for the nappy on the child in the Dome, or choosing £400 a roll wallpaper?

'Contrariwise', continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so it would be: but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'