Lecture to Sheffield students, 1997

I’ve been asked to talk about the future of the profession. Many regard us as working in a threatened profession, threatened by the new electronic environment. I don’t share this view. I think the future is bright although it does mean a careful reconsideration of what the profession is and does. however it seems to me that the best way to go forward is to look back at our roots and to identify our strengths and skills which can then be developed in the new electronic environment. So let me begin with a brief potted history of librarianship and the skills we have developed over time.

In the very earliest days, the main requirement was strength. The first royal archives, such as at Ashurbanipal, consisted of tablets of stone, which must have done wonders for the muscles, since open access hadn't been invented. The next requirement was to use the muscles to throw sand and water at fires, judging by the destruction of the great library at Alexandria, a sort of primitive disaster control planning. We can then move on to the fifth century where St Jerome was in the process of turning into the patron saint of librarians. He was difficult and cantankerous, was the guide and mentor of a group of dedicated ladies, although his relationship with them gave rise to gossip which the Oxford dictionary of saints coyly describes as "largely unjustified". On consideration it seems to me that the patronage of St Jerome should be confined to chief librarians. I know very few assistant librarians who are both cantankerous and lecherous. By the time the universities had properly begun in the early middle ages, the monks in the scriptorium in Paris were copying manuscripts on a production line basis in order to form the first short loan collections for their undergraduates. They presumably worried about quill maintenance contracts rather than photocopy quality and introduced the concept of dealing with library suppliers. By the seventeenth century St Andrews University was introducing the death penalty for non-return of library books. Admittedly, the one reader who was executed was also accused of rebellion, murder, robbery and insurrection, but non-return of library books was down on the bottom of the charge sheet. So we can add the preservation of public order to the list. Hatred of readers comes next. When Thomas Carlyle was a student at Edinburgh University in 1814, a fat Highlander was sub-librarian. On cold winter's mornings he stood firmly behind the locked door, with the students battering at it, until the very last stroke of ten had sounded. He would then open it very slowly. Unable to express his contempt with feet or fists he would turn his back on the crowd, bend over and prove that the controlled expulsion of gas was yet another skill required of the librarian. This of course was further proof, if proof were needed of Maurice Line's joyous sentence from a 1980 lecture that he did not propose to go into the history of ignoring users, since there was no time to give a history of librarianship from its beginnings.

Then there was the question of whether this was a real job or just an early form of moonlighting. Over 100 years ago in 1890 a predecessor of mine at King's College London was appointed. The College Principal had a clear view of the library training required: "The Principal thought that as a successor to Mr Lamb it would be desirable to get a young man who could give most of his time to the work; possibly a young clergyman who was only employed otherwise on Sundays would answer the purpose". In 1904 confetti was invented with the creation of edge-notched cards, an early example of co-operation with the private sector. By 1908 F M Cornford of the University of Cambridge obviously pre-figured modern concepts of open access libraries when he wrote that books should be stored in such a way that no one can find them without several years training.

Before the Second World War at least some university libraries recruited library boys straight from school. They were given a practical grounding in running the library and the good ones, still without any formal qualifications, rose through the ranks. Some of them gave up to fifty years of service to their library in all sorts of capacities. Edinburgh University recently rewarded one of these library boys, a very good friend of mine, with an Honorary MA, still his only formal qualification. The point of this is that as recently as the 1930s a certain native intelligence and wit was seen as enough of a background; on the job training provided the rest. The skills needed to deal with readers remained much the same however. Roy Hattersley has written lovingly of his days as a student in Hull, where the Library operated on the Polonius Principle - neither a borrower nor a lender be - and keeping a girl out all night was safer than doing the same to a book.

Then in the nineteen sixties we move to the last act of the tragedy (or is it a farce) and our decision to become an all graduate profession, although still concentrating on traditional skills. The future arrived, at least in my library school, in 1969 when automation first entered the curriculum as an option - Historical Bibliography or Library Automation was the choice. More recently we have tended to concentrate on modern management oriented concepts. There was a recent course for librarians interested in personnel work held at Senate House in the University of London. It offered morning lectures on bad time-keeping, alcohol abuse, drug abuse and sexual harassment. There was then to be a buffet lunch followed by some hands on experience. Not that sex features on the official library school curriculum. By one of those nice coincidences, while I was first writing this piece I saw a review of Nicholas Slonimsky's autobiography which referred to an earlier work he had written called 'Sex and the Music Librarian'. I tried to track this book down, with no success until I mentioned it to a colleague who is a music librarian. "Ah yes" he said "I know the piece, but it's a journal article not a book - there isn't enough of it for a book". Sadly, it now appears to be an unpublished conference paper.

Library schools officially prefer to teach more public interpersonal skills such as management. Here democratic concepts such as teamwork abound; I treasure a reference which I received for one candidate which recorded that "he must be good at teamwork, because he plays in a band". Douglas Foskett thought a love of cricket and an appreciation of beer the fundamental qualities which we require.

Although we have displayed all of these skills and abilities over the centuries public perceptions stay resolutely the same - we think. Stress free ladies of uncertain age in twin sets, ever ready to chide and hush, or to put up the sort of notice reputed to have appeared in Northampton Public Library about 1940, 'Persons must not lie on the shelves'.(7) Many librarians are obsessed with image, the spectacles and the bun, the wimp. My children's bedtime stories include a series by Dorothy Edwards about My Naughty Little Sister. In these the Librarian is known as the Shush Lady. But then when the Smirnoff advert comes along we complain about that image too. Then we have the group who believe that a smattering of automation allows them to force their views on others who if they are not with us are Luddites. There is the assertive group of librarians who strut around being proactive, aiming for a sort of Conan the Librarian image. Yet when we look around for real-life role models, these are an equally unlikely bunch. Forget Dewey and Panizzi, what about those other great librarians - Imelda Marcos (the Iron Butterfly), Philip Larkin, Golda Meir, Mao Tse Tung and, of course, Casanova? At least I can assure you that we are not boring. According to that bible of the trades and professions, the yellow Pages, for "Boring see Civil Engineers".

However, let me now turn to the future of the profession. It would be all to easy to launch into some expansive view of the library without walls, of collection free libraries where we shift away from all the dreadful stereotypes like Sourdust, the exquisitely named librarian in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, who is Master of the Rituals and Guardian of the Collections. To be Master of the Rituals and Guardian of the Collections is a perfectly respectable role and one which many libraries and librarians will fulfil even into the future with distinction. However, although my theme today is that of the future and change, I want to suggest to you that the way we cope with and manage that change is by holding fast to our traditional skills and professional abilities. I would perhaps suggest that we go back to basics, save that that phrase now has some very negative attributes. I perceive a situation in which librarians have become besotted by a restless search for the latest bright baubles of information technology, who find the provision of a coloured screen windows environment a substitute for thought and who blow in the wind - or is it the flatulence - of every new management fad. I want to suggest to you that the way to deal with the future is to hold fast to that which is at the core of our profession and to look at a future which has solid roots in our professional present and in the culture of library and information science.

I recently attended a conference where there was a presentation by someone from an FE College who had become enthused by all that was new and was bursting to tell us all that he was doing. All of it was good and appeared to be well done - if still largely planned rather than implemented.

A new network architecture was being put in place to link several campuses; CD's were to be networked; object oriented processing was to be put in place; a network licence had been bought costing not twelve hundred pounds but £1.2k; the Library OPAC is to be networked and even linked to the OPAC of the local public library; a one box approach is to be adopted; megastream links between sites are planned and even a link to SuperJANET. The Internet is to be opened up to the College. This is parallelled by a whole new management approach and philosophy. Courses are to be demand led; staff will all respond to TQM and BS5750 initiatives; customer care is the new creed. The only question which appeared not to have been considered was whether the institution needed any of this and whether it was relevant. Does CD-ROM networking give value for money? Is SuperJANET the Concorde de nos jours? Does TQM really stand for The Quuen Mary, because its beached in California, loses money and runs on hot air? Is BS5750 relevant to a service organisation? If all educational institutions are to be demand led, what is to happen to important or even minority subjects and will we produce nothing but doctors, lawyers and english graduates? Surely education is the perfect example of an area which must always be supply led and where the wish to explore and map the new is encouraged as research rather than inflicted on a student body eager to learn rather than be the rats in the experiment.

I want to argue that the knowledge based enterprise of the future will not be created by the slavish adoption of all the attributes of the private sector but by creating our own environment with our own rules and our own standards and our own goals and vision. This is of course difficult given the nature of government policy in which obfuscation is all to precise a term for the activities of the Department for Education, and where we have suffered in recent years from one, John Patten and two, Gillian Shepherd where the numbers refer to IQ rather than precedence. Higher and further education does not exist to create identical production line products. Our institutions consist of groups of individually talented people who work together in the creation of new knowledge and the transmission of previously developed knowledge. As Douglas Van Houweling has put it we should be "centered on challenge and opportunity, not organization and process. Our focus is not on routine, but on change". While we as managers and our administrators may focus on management and issues of resource allocation at institutional level, academic staff make their links by discipline across institutional boundaries. The increasing domination of institutions by accountants and management consultants is a pernicious trend which should be resisted. It seems to me most unlikely that this resistance will come about through institutional managements or, say, the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals, probably the only remaining British institution where sangfroid is indistinguishable from rigor mortis. It then falls to professional groups such as ours to argue the case for academic led rather than financial led approaches in our organisations.

We are, or should be, public servants and not the proponents of the squalor of private industry and commerce where in the name of efficiency, management consultants have brought us the longest waiting lists in National Health Service history and where the design of the computer systems for the Wessex Health Authority has cost the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds and where the design of the software for the London Ambulance Service has actually cost lives; while accountants have brought us the sleazy antics of the Maxwell pension funds,the virtual collapse of Lloyds of London and of course now Barings actual collapse.

Let me now turn from the ethics of greed to look at our professional future and begin with what will be a dominant theme - the Internet and the information superhighway. There are lots of visions of what this will be and do, but for us perhaps the most important question is whether we are to be information consumers or information brokers and providers. It is claimed that the Internet is growing by 4.5 million users a month and the quantity of data available is growing by a commensurate amount. 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. Which is to run the network - the moguls or the anarchist communes? The present state of the Internet was usefully described by A.J. Wright, in a comparison with a traditional library:

...the shelves have been removed...the materials lie in huge piles all over the building. The locks on the door have been changed, and there are vendors everywhere selling keys... you find the call numbers have been changed into a language system you do not understand. The OPAC terminals are gone, but there are voices everywhere --- you cannot see anyone --- talking about this or that guide. You pick up the first book you see and find that its contents have been transformed into language for which you will need a special translator. "Welcome to the virtual library" says the display.

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, not least because there is significant debate as to what the network actually is and does. There has been a recent trend to see it as a purely social phenomenon."The Great Love Byte" proclaimed the Sunday Timesin 1995, with a piece declaring that "Computer networks are the singles bars of the 1990's". Howard Rheingold in his book "The Virtual Community” compares it to the corner bar - a sort of poor man's version of "Cheers". The Financial Times had a major spread on the topic already worrying about network traffic jams and complaining about the lack of catalogue and directory facilities. There is even a cartoon [slide]. Not perhaps as famous as the New Yorker's "No one knows you're a dog on the Internet, but none the less showing that the concept has caught the public imagination. It almost sounds like the title of a Garth Brooks Country and Western Song. Special issues of Scientific American and features in popular magazines such as Byte all serve to spread the gospel.

Networking brings a whole new range of terminology to deal with its activities. Some of that activity is very serious in terms of defining futures and it is a matter of some concern how little of UK Librarianship is engaged in, for example, the development of Permanent Universal Resource Locators and Digital Object Identifiers. These are the tools being designed to catalogue and classify the resources available on networks and we should be there. In practice the work is being done largely by American information specialists or in the UK by non-librarians. Some of the terms are perhaps less serious. Peter Stone has described our future role as "providing the pilots for cruises in information cyberspace”. Cyberspace, for example was recently and usefully described as where the money in your bank account is.

Like Cavafy's Romans we can wait paralysed for the Barbarians - who in his poem never came - or we can move ahead charting our own course and our own future in a way which will allow us to deal with the barbarians. As the cartoon from the Financial Times has put it we can stay parked in a rest area somewhere off the information superhighway - or we can move at least into the slow lane if we feel unready for the fast lane. 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

- User support and instruction

- Archiving and preservation

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 tha 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? 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? If resource discovery systems are to be set up, are these all to be managed at local level or do we need national subject based initiatives as the Follett report proposes? 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. So far the principle response appears to be to discuss an extension of MARC tagging rather than to reconsider the nature of information.

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. For example, take a monograph entitled Post-War British Immigration. We have quite different expectations from this monograph if it has an Oxford University Press imprint from one which has a British National Party imprint or if the author is Bernie Grant rather than Enoch Powell. 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 consider and design systems which are user friendly. Much of what we have historically done has been user oblivious, wishing to serve the user of the future rather than the user of today. All sorts of areas come into this and I would commend to you the simple expedient of trying to use an unfamiliar library. It can be quite frightening to say wander in when unfamiliar evening staff are on duty and try to borrow a book or check a reference. Everything from traditional problems such as lighting quality or signing and guiding, through to Library tours and the number and availability of OPAC's or the ease of sending messages from the OPAC to the ILL Department should be considered in looking at the accessibility of the library and its collections and services. Individual areas such as public relations or marketing can be identified readily in professional litereature but I tend to feel that too little thought is sometimes given to looking at the whole environment in which the librarian, the library and the user interact.

And that leads to my user instruction. Although I and others have talked for quite some time about empowering end users - and indeed services such as BIDS do precisely that - it is equally clear that users require to be helped to take the fullest advantage of that freedom. Most of our 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. Some institutions are now so physically overstretched that they rely on the fact of students not attending university every day to be workable. At the same time financial pressure on students may lead to greater attendance at local institutions so that the student may live at home - again leading to a form of distance - albeit short distance - learning.

The same messages are true for academic staff. At my own institution we have been undertaking a major project funded by BLRDD to consider some of the issues surrounding technology take-up.[i] This is being done through a close study of a small group presented with an information rich environment. A number of perhaps obvious points have emerged. The first problem is finding the time to invest in setting up and learning systems. Secondly there is not a perceived current unmet need for information. Most academics believe they have good information gathering systems already. In part this reflects an understanding of the danger of information overload. Brindley has argued that because of this there is a need for a much greater and more active future role for the librarian in filtering information, mirroring my previous point relating to quality assurance. The still apparently inevitable technical problems lead to great frustration for users. There is also a feeling of enthusiasm and power for those who succeed and of impotence for those who do not. These lead to complex cultural problems and a need for significantly supportive environments although there is a general reluctance to seek support.

The final and fourth area is Archiving and preservation [use stuff from UNESCO lecture]

So what are librarians to do to address these issues. Kathleen Price, the Law Librarian of the Library of Congress has expressed views which I wholeheartedly support as the basis for the next steps we need to take. She argues that to be participants in the electronic world we have to recognise a number of truths:

- information is a commodity and must be paid for;

- librarians and publishers have provided added value, performed a societal good, and deserve to succeed;

- we are likely to perform different services in a different manner in the future;

- creators of information increasingly have the option of working directly with end users;

- services inherently necessary to the success of the Internet are within our expertise and we should stake them out by the (a) creation of an electronic locator; (b) identification of information to be converted to electronic form; and (c) provision of public access stations to electronic information with adequate training and internal guides.

It seems to me that these are precisely the areas and ways in which we have to move forward in order to develop our vision of the future knowledge information chain. 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 then close with my two alternative visions of the future. The first or static view might be reflected in Theodor Roethke's 1943 poem Dolor, where:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils...

Desolation in immaculate public places...

And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,

Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,

Sift,almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,

Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,

Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

This sounds very reminiscent of the world inhabited by the already mentioned librarian of Gormenghast, Sourdust, where nothing changes and the rituals and ceremonies continue for now forgotten reasons.

Alternatively and perhaps perversely in a search for our basics we may go 600 years back to the future seeking our information highway with Chaucer:

Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!

Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;

Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede,

And trowth thee shal delivere, it is no drede.

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. Know our own country and we shall hold the highway - the information highway that is. We will not, I repeat not, do this by hitching our wagon to every glittering and shallow fad that comes along peddled by a snake-oil salesman, but by being secure in and developing our traditional professional skills.

[i]. Barry, Christine Information Access in Research: Findings on early take-up [unpublished paper, School of Education, King's College London]