A New Professionalism for the Electronic Age?

The spread of networking has been as rapid as it has been unforeseen

Change is inevitable except from vending machines

[Role of management) We analyse, strategise, prioritise, conceptualise [the Flintstones]

Books rather than on-line are for those old-fashioned folk who prefer to look things up the easy way.

As Thomas Carlyle said of the lady who wrote to him saying that she accepted the universe "By God, she'd better".

Computer literacy may be defined as memorising the phone number of your software rep.

At the same time I sense that the paradigm of scholarly communication is changing. The collaboratory has arrived. Over the last five years the number of multi-authored papers with authors from more than one country has risen from 10% to 25 % of those listed in Science Citation Index. Working methods are changing. In the physical sciences there does seem to be firm evidence that in at least physics, mathematics and computing the game has shifted. Papers are written, circulated, discussed and modified and the discipline moves on. Only at a later stage is archival publication managed. And who is to do that archiving in an electronic world? Those selfsame publishers who have been incapable of doing it for the last 500 years. Did you watch that interesting video of the Hewlett Packard future the other day? It fairly acutely recorded the research process in which sciences develop and test theorems and showed what seems to be happening in science. Apart from the quaint notion that there is enough bandwidth to suck video from Europe, did you notice the complete absence of information professionals in the case of Emily and the mushrooms. In that new research paradigm our role remains very uncertain.

Finally let me mention a little mentioned threat. Marion Ball quoted Wyatt in suggesting that “professional medical societies are increasingly taking responsibility for their members competence”. I’m sure that’s true. it also means that they are bound to consider defining, prescribing and delivering the relevant information to their membership. If as George Bernard Shaw suggested that all professions are conspiracies against the laity, we may expect professional medical societies to bypass us in a much more planned way.

You have heard many papers about the future of the profession and its redefinition. Our role in this future has yet to be defined, but it seems to have some obvious features which relate to our traditional skills. However we have some way to go to reach this pleasure dome. The Internet, that network of networks has been constructed in a climate of controlled chaos and as a public good. It is now threatened, and I use that word advisedly by the arrival of all sorts of people. Not just friendly traditional publishers in new garb, but cable companies, satellite companies, telephone companies, Rupert Murdoch and other media magnates with squads of lawyers and accountants. We may have to revisit the concept of information rich and information poor in a world where the notion of proprietary and generic applies to information as much as to medicine. Anyone in Europe knows that in network terms you can forget the United States in the afternoon. We also know that multi-national publishers and governments have provided restricted access to selected groups. It may be that where speed is of the essence we have to prescribe generic information, or even just what we can find, even when we know that other resources exist.

The view of current users was recently and eloquently described by David Bouchier, an avowed technophobe. He noted that:

From time to time I venture into the howling wastes of the Internet. The technocrats promise us that this information overload will increase a thousand times, ten thousand times until every suburban home will have access to every piece of useless information in the universe.

Bringing order to that chaos is a huge challenge, and one which we are failing. Jill Foster has painted a wonderful image of computer scientists being like Mickey Mouse in the cartoon Fantasia, where as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice he waves a wand and unleashes buckets of information on to the network. But she claims, she knows the Sorceror, the Chief cataloguer of her university. At this point the analogy breaks down for me. What have cataloguers done, our Praetorian Guard, the holders of our sacred mysteries. They have added an extra field to the MARC record. The MARC record which even Michael Gorman has called “a glittering coffin”. We need to set the agenda for change and we can do it through imaginative extension of our existing professional skills. Not new wine in old bottles, but old wine in new bottles perhaps. There are four major areas which I wish to explore in developing this argument: The organization of knowledge; Quality assurance of information; Custodianship; User instruction

So to begin, the organisation of knowledge. I have used before the example of the American Civil War Series which ran to some sixteen hours of television and is now a standard instructional tool. How is the three minute segment on the Gettysburg address going to be identified? There has been renewed interest of late in trying to enhance catalogue records so that they rather more fully record what printed volumes contain. This becomes even more of a problem with networked and multimedia resources where a whole new set of issues arise. How do we define the original and uncorrupted text? How do we define the status of the latest and intermediate texts? The quantity of misinformation on the Internet has already been mentioned. It is a literally deadly problem for us. Do we distinguish between supported resources and unsupported resources? It is now virtually an article of professional faith that we shall move from holdings to access strategies. How are we to manage that? Do we begin to catalogue the things we don't have rather than the things we do? Where web pages are set up, are these all to be managed at local level or do we need national subject based initiatives? Do we really believe that Web crawlers can replace our judgement? Managing and making accessible the resources of the Internet is a huge professional challenge and thus far I have to say that I see very little sign that our profession is getting to grips with the issues - and yet the organisation of knowledge is one of our traditional domains.

Next comes quality assurance. I have already touched on one aspect of that in terms of defining what is either the latest or the master version of an electronic publication. Electronic publications are much more susceptible to corruption since it is quite difficult to tell from where they originate and whether and when they have been changed either accidentally or by design. But there are other problems too. Conventional publication has markers. The imprint Oxford University Press implies something about quality. The homepage network address OXFORD.AC.UK implies a range of possibilities from a university press to a student bedroom. To a degree, library acquisition policies have provided a form of quality assurance in that we buy only what is presumed to be relevant or appropriate. But when everything is available without these markers, selection by the user becomes more of a problem.

Thirdly we need to revisit the much maligned areas of archiving and preservation. We need to look at revivifying the University Presses as a means of making scholarship properly available. We need to look at setting up a Copyright Clearing Agency in which we license limited rights to commercial publishers on our terms. We need to look at how we preserve the intellectual record of the academy. And I would argue that the responsibility is ours. Some 64 institutions have survived largely unchanged since the fourteenth century, the Papacy, the parliament of Iceland, the Tynwald of the Isle of Man and 61 universities. Here again we neglect our roots at our peril.

And so to my fourth and final area of skills, user instruction. Although I and others have talked for quite some time about empowering end users, it is equally clear that users require to be helped to take the fullest advantage of that freedom. Most of our student users have, almost by definition, no learning curve since they are with us for a very short number of years. Some of the trends in education suggest that we will see much greater emphasis on distance learning where again support and instruction becomes critical. The same is true of telemedicine. There is a lot of experience which shows that the acquisition costs are trivial compared with the ownership costs.. It is the support, the instruction and the documentation which makes a difference. But we need to argue that loud and long. We don’t really want to see videos like Emily’s mushrooms which ignore those elements. One of those laws of life which usually come with Murphy’s name attached is that Intuitive systems aren’t.

I am reluctant to use phrases for this such as "the library without walls" if only because a library without walls will find that the roof falls in. So let me settle for the conventional phrase of the virtual library. The future is going to be difficult, demanding and different, but the surest and best way of attacking and enjoying it is through the fruits of our professional disciplines and training, through their extension, development and renewal.

A manifesto for health libraries

Libraries and librarians will concentrate on three core concerns

connectivity - providing universal access to the products of the human mind

content - creating a digital library of materials required by health professionals

competences - equipping individuals and organisations to play their full role in the

information society

These three core needs grow from a restatement of the core values of librarians, who:

- work with knowledge; add value by evaluating, making accessible, mediating, packaging and promoting knowledge

- are the memory of society through collecting and preserving knowledge

- form a substantial and growing sector of the economy

- are necessary to the well-being of individuals, communities and society

- reach into people’s lives in many ways; people use a range of LIS throughout their lives and often use several different “libraries” at any one point in their lives

- provide access to opportunities for lifelong learning; the knowledge which underpins all successful economic activity; the information which is central to a healthy and democratic society;

- empower the individual by providing resources and information for particular user groups and the information skills which are the essential coping skills for modern-day living

- embody the value of collective activity; engender a sense of community within places and organizations; and provide a space where people can feel secure within a shared value system