Achieving Cultural Change

Reid, Bruce J. & Foster, William eds. Achieving Cultural Change in Networked Libraries 282p. ISBN 0 566 08200 4

It is now a commonplace that the development of electronic services will be governed much more by the developments of cultures than technologies and that is the thesis of this book. Much of it grows from the under-regarded TAPin project based at the University of Central England as part of the e-Lib Programme, which looked at training of academic and LIS staff in a number of West Midlands universities. A number of what might be regarded as preliminary chapters look at theories of cultural change, at the impact of the e-Lib Programme and at convergence of library and computer services. The project is explored in some detail in several chapters and although firmly rooted in the academic library experience there appears to be a ritual genuflection towards special libraries in one chapter. The book concludes with chapters on lessons learned from TAPin, and on the way ahead for the profession.

It is a very good, generally well written and interesting book. Like all to many edited compilations – it has fifteen chapters and ten authors – it does however have the flavour of a themed issue of a journal rather than a work with a coherent and sustained thesis, although the links of most of the authors to the School of Information Studies at UCE perhaps give a similarity of thinking missing from many such volumes. Several chapters provide substantial literature reviews and are heavily descriptive rather than analytical and none of them manages to dig below the surface blandness of much of the literature. And so they require careful reading. In a generally sound history of the development of the UK university system Reid nevertheless manages to show his prejudices in asserting that polytechnics managed to develop integrated library systems before the old universities (an interesting denial of the roles of Newcastle and Southampton in the sixties or BLCMP, SCOLCAP and SWALCAP in the seventies). He also claims that some of the most deleterious of the stresses and strains in Higher Education have fallen disproportionately on the ex-polytechnic sector – at best a one-sided judgement. Foster’s analysis of the e-Lib programme is also sound but neglects any consideration of how the Follett Committee, set up to address problems in teaching was largely hijacked by a research agenda. Nor is consideration given to the impacts of the related funding council programmes on content creation (NFF) or the JISC datasets programme. Sutton also provides a good review of convergence in two chapters on the topic. As with all too many such studies, the focus is almost entirely from the library end. This may reflect the general state of the literature, but the common view that this is to do with technological push or funding council pressures for information strategies conceals as much as it reveals. The absence of any significant literature from the computing side in the UK arguably conceals a general perception by university managers of a failure of computing services which coincided with the disappearance of the nanny state of the Computer Board and the subsequent loss of confidence engendered by the ill-fated MAC initiative. At least arguably, much convergence followed institutional reviews in which the choice of messianic reviewers also played a significant if untold role.

The book is inevitably strongest on its major theme of the TAPin project, to which several chapters are devoted. This also opens up some useful related literature by authors such as Barrie who have approached academic behaviour from a psychological rather than a librarian’s perspective. The TAPin model is notably well described by Flatten. Generally the project highlighted the growing instructional role of librarians, a developing central professional skill as well as re-emphasising the value of traditional skills albeit used in novel ways. What the project did not set out to do is to examine the perception of a growing divergence between academic and student use of libraries, an anecdotally important but little studied phenomenon.

Ultimately this is a very positive book. Despite the nitpicking it describes a period of transition and change and shows ways in which that can be embraced. This is a major book with a firm UK basis and perspective and should be critically enjoyed.