SCONUL 2009 (Bournemouth)
It’s quite odd to get to that point in your career where what you have to do is to stand up and explain how good it used to be. This is the 25th anniversary of my first SCONUL meeting. My memory of it I hazy – it may have been held in Oxford. My only abiding memory of it was meeting a very tall and very distinguished Philip Larkin, who was by then almost stone deaf. I vividly remember showing him the way to the Gents toilet, but nothing else of that meeting. Not very significant as a memory! So what I’ve been asked to do today is to reflect on my career and the lessons learned and to try to give a personal impression of what the future might hold.
It’s always difficult looking forward to decide what is important and significant in the long term and what are just phases that will pass. 1969 was the year I went to Library School, having completed a degree in Mediaeval History, which fits one for nothing in life. 1969 was a year of momentous events, but at the time it would have been difficult to pick out which would be the events of long term importance.
The biggest story was of course the first moon landing, but in the end that may be less significant to most people’s lives than the fact that the first Gap store opened in San Francisco. Both Concorde and the Boeing 747 made their maiden flights. One was new technology, the other was boring but proved the harbinger of cheap and easy mass intercontinental travel, but no one would have guessed that. The Beatles gave their last public concert, Woodstock happened as did the first Led Zeppelin album. All marked a generation – but not nearly as much as the un-noticed at the time appearance of the AIDS virus in the United States.
And it was a time of great men. Nixon succeeded Johnson; Ho Chi Minh died; Yasser Arafat was elected leader of the PLO and there was hope of peace in the Middle East; De Gaulle lost a referendum and retired; Muammar Gaddafi led a coup in Libya; Charles was invested as Prince of Wales. Dudley Watkins, cartoonist of the Beano died as did Jack Kerouac. But while all of these made headlines, almost no one noticed the opening of the first ATM cashpoint in New York.
Regular colour television broadcasts arrived in the UK, just in time for the launch of Monty Python, but only a few nerds were aware that the first ARPANET links were established late in the year, foreshadowing the internet.
The library world I entered was a very stable one, largely unchanged since at least the nineteenth century and operating in buildings which were at best pre-second world war. In Glasgow, where I was a student, the innovative Round Reading Room was from the 1930s, while at my first job in St Andrews the Library occupied Parliament Hall, so called because the Scottish Parliament sat there in the seventeenth century. Like many, I was a beneficiary of the expansion of the universities in the nineteen sixties, offering a route to a degree rather than following my parents and grandparents to a factory job. The career path for librarians was pretty straightforward. After a year at library school taking a postgraduate diploma, the career grade was Assistant Librarian in which most stayed throughout their careers. Those who moved on (and how quickly you got out of the cataloguing department was a pretty clear sign of promotability) became a Sub-Librarian by about the age of thirty-five, deputy librarian about the age of forty-five and librarian about the age of fifty-five. The librarian was a senior and distinguished member of the academic community and of course everyone had to visit the library. Visiting other libraries was a rare summer treat for academics while Inter-Library loan was at best vestigial, because of course we still operated using the great guard book catalogues which occupied entire rooms. A few daring libraries such as Southampton and Newcastle were playing with library automation, but it was a cumbersome and ungainly activity involving 80 column punch cards and visits to the Computer Centre. However I was prepared. The seminal event of 1969 for me was that the library school at Strathclyde introduced a new module of Library automation. It was an alternative to historical bibliography and I chose it because I’d had enough of history. Thus are career choices made.
I began my career in St Andrews on a salary of £1010 pounds a year. A big sum then. I was immediately launched into my first arcane academic dispute. It was over pension funds and the changes in rules as the old FSSU scheme became the USS scheme we still know and love. It was agreed that in transferring prior service could be counted towards pensions. So a year as a SCONUL trainee was counted. Service in the Armed forces in World War II was counted. So professors of German, of whom there were many could count service in the Luftwaffe bombing universities for their pensions, while conscientious objectors, of whom there were many could not count their years in jail or in the mines.
Then there was new technology. The first new technology I became involved in was that newfangled tool, the photocopier. It was still a wet and very messy process and the first public machines were a nightmare. There remains more than a grain of truth in the notion that the two great tasks of library management are dealing with photocopiers and leaking roofs. Mail still referred to the postal service and all mail coming into the Library, whoever it was addressed to was opened by the Librarians Secretary and distributed as she deemed fit. This was where I learned the first rule of libraries that the two most important people in the organisation are the Librarian’s Secretary and the Head Porter. Fall out with them and your dead. I also had my first brush with officialdom in the shape of the University Grants Committee. I was put on the team building the new Library at St Andrews. I was of course the gofer. In those days the UGC paid for and had to approve all new capital construction. The new library was duly built. The only hiccup was that the contractors forgot to connect the sewers to the mains drainage and we used up the contingency fund to remedy this. The bill was then sent in and in due course a magisterial letter arrived from Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer. The letter approved most of the expenditure but went on that the Committee was minded not to approve the final use of the contingency fund. It was, it continued, a matter of fact that contingency funds were intended to meet unforeseeable needs. However it was the judgement of the committee that while connecting the sewer to the mains was unforeseen it was certainly not unforeseeable.
Although first degrees in library science existed, a much more common qualification route was a first degree in almost any discipline – English and history being prevalent – with a one-year diploma course taken at a library science department and two years of on-the-job training leading to Associateship of the Library Association. Formal training and career development were non-existent, with skills developed by example. Some practical skills were gained through involvement in the committees of the Library Association – often a sandpit for Young Turks – and attendance at conferences was rare, usually national and only very exceptionally international. Many librarians pursued a sort of dual career undertaking scholarship in a small way, publishing in decently obscure journals, usually in the humanities. The skill set acquired at age twenty-two could last a professional lifetime. Almost without exception the entire university passed through the doors of the library. No serious researcher, scholar or undergraduate could work without the collections of the library and the inter-library loan service. There was as yet no national library service and very little co-operation with other libraries beyond the local. The University Grants Committee Annual Report for 1921 had famously stated ‘The character and efficiency of a university may be gauged by its treatment of its central organ – the library. We regard the fullest provision for library maintenance as the primary and most vital need in the equipment of a university.’ And on the whole libraries were well funded. The Parry Report cited this statement with apparent approbation, maintaining that it was as true as ever, but noted without comment if some asperity, that little was known about the adequacy or efficiency of libraries. The role of computers in management of the institution was non-existent. Again the operation was local. JANET was not created until 1983 and even then was limited and partial in its availability. E-learning did not of course exist.
Throughout the 1970’s the dominant feature was the inexorable growth and spread of technology and the first tentative moves from purely locally based activity to national and international co-operation. In truth in libraries much of the period was spent in developing what was really mechanisation of existing processes. Librarians by and large spent a generation developing library housekeeping systems with all sorts of glittering features, but these were and are gold-plated dinosaurs. As a general rule, throughout the period, library users still had to visit the library, still go to a catalogue hall and write down the call number on a scrap of paper, still go to the shelf, still find the book they really wanted was not there, and still come to the issue desk to argue about paying fines. Such re-skilling as went on was a consequence of purchasing commercial systems and associated training. Conferences and special interest groups grew in number to exchange experience.
It remained a fairly unstressed profession. I will never forget sitting in the staff room at Edinburgh in about 1979 and having the then librarian Dick Fifoot say to me. “Derek, when you become a Chief Librarian you will discover that running the University Library is a two day a week job…….
The 1980’s continued this trend of mechanisation. The Government response to large scale youth unemployment was the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) which allowed us to embark on massive and in many cases still incomplete retroconversion projects of our catalogues. From the mid-1980s a febrile debate began on the opportunities which were emerging - remember JANET was not created until 1983. These huge recon projects represented a major investment and many staff received formal training in project management, usually from external consultants. As a side benefit this gave a confidence in management and an appetite for developing technology. And a new range of skills was expected but never provided for. Along with other university staff, information services staff were expected to develop skills in areas as wide-ranging as fundraising, marketing, human resource management, and resource management. Most universities were now prepared for this and a range of internal and external courses was made available as well as a much more formalized process of assessment and goal-setting.
It was in the late 1980’s that I was given my first library to run, the Erskine Medical Library. It was there that I first met the power of Senior Library Assistants. Being a good modern man I took my turn at the service desk. One evening duty a week and one Saturday a month. Being a lazy sod I neglected to be trained in the rules and regulations and made decisions as I went along. After a month the Senior Library Assistant who ran the service desk came in and fired me. I was just more trouble than I was worth.
By the end of the decade the Computer Board, which had overseen the purchase of mainframe computers for universities on a 7 year cycle was coming to its end and was about to be replaced by the Information Systems Committee in turn replaced within eighteen months by the JISC as Higher Education funding passed to the Home Nations. I was privileged to be the only Librarian ever to serve on the Computer Board. On the Board one was given a part of the United Kingdom to look after and cherish over the seven year cycle. As the new boy I was given the easiest part of the country and I still treasure the letter giving me my new title and responsibilities. Yes I was made the Godfather for Wales.
Things speeded up from 1991 when JISC was created. Electronic information resources had existed since the mid-1960s, particularly in the sciences. However access to them had been significantly restricted. The resources were abstract and indexing tools rather than primary sources and all searching was mediated and batch processed. In many universities, while on-line searching operated from the library it was conducted by externally funded individuals whose principal skill was disciplinary. It was very much at the edge of library life. Technology slowly and inexorably spread, although it was not until the early 1980s that the possession of a personal computer became relatively common in universities. And of course JANET1 was only created in 1983. By 1990 the new technology in libraries was CD-ROM. Most libraries had by now set up IT systems departments, buying in technical skills rather than retraining staff. Libraries still looked back. A raging debate took place in libraries on whether users should be allowed unmediated access to CD-ROMs and if so whether they should have to attend mandatory training courses. The now ubiquitous PowerPoint was launched only in 1987 but by 1990 was not in common use. Remember all those acetates? Teaching remained largely traditional. All of this change happened at a time when the librarians of the 1960’s were taking retirement. A slew of brash new kids on the block was suddenly overpromoted in their late thirties – a good decade ahead of tradition. That group, the self-styled class of 86, set up the first and longest lasting victim support group to share experience, terror and later to try and influence the course of events nationally.
In 1991 the first-ever national site license was signed with the Institute for Scientific Information to create the BIDS (Bath Information and Data Services) service. Like many of the best ideas it was dreamed up in a pub – the now sadly closed Hand and Racquet pub in Orange Street off the Haymarket in London. This confirmed the position of the UK as the leading country in developing both the theory and practice of electronic information provision. The short-lived Information Systems Committee became the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as the home nations set up their own funding councils. The Joint Funding Councils promptly commissioned a review of libraries – in part driven by the addition of the polytechnics to the sector. This reported in December 1992, although I’m not sure whether Brian Follett ever really tumbled to the fact that the electronic library bits of his report were written a year earlier, before he was even appointed. The Follett Report foresaw a major expansion of electronic library activity. That was picked up by the JISC. It funded electronic resources, it adopted a mission of promoting cultural change, it promoted training groups and activities and it required all institutions to adopt an information strategy. It consciously set out to involve every institution in projects and activities and training and considering the future. This forced library and computer managements to work together to consider joint futures. Then in 1993 the World Wide Web was invented and the world changed forever.
Convergence
The response of many institutions to the changing environment was to bring the library and computer centre under common management. This model and its variants spread like wildfire through the higher education system in the UK – although, curiously, almost nowhere else in the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, and despite the huge cultural differences between librarians and computer centre staff, no real effort was made to consider human resource issues. The larger groupings required a broader range of management skills and there was a general growth in the use of management training courses for senior managers. As for all other staff, the JISC played a seminal role in developing staff. The nationally driven eLib program was crucial but aimed very much at library staff
At first the tendency was to assume that this new type of converged information service would recruit or retrain a generation of Renaissance men and women armed with a copy of Dewey in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, capable of resolving any user need. When these paragons failed to appear, a more realistic approach emerged which created small teams of experts each with their own set of skills, albeit still with some understanding of how to resolve issues in computing or web searching. New mantras inspired by American business then began to appear and the wish was to become ‘user-centered’ and ‘customer-focused’. So while the skills of the librarian were again seen as relevant within converged services, these were to be presented in quite new ways. The profession prided itself on having a long tradition going back four thousand years to Ashurbanipal’s great library of tablets of stone. They fondly remembered Thomas Young, the natural philosopher and polymath, who when he died in 1829 was recorded as the last man who knew everything. Since then society had required intermediaries to manage and organize knowledge in all its published forms. The organization of knowledge, with cataloguing and classification as its core, if arcane, competences provided the set of skills and knowledge which defined the professional knowledge base. A major research library might contain a million volumes and academic staff had little alternative to finding what they needed in the collections. Apart from visits to other universities or archives in the long vacation and inter library loan (again controlled by library staff) there were only vestigial alternatives to using these professional intermediaries to gain access to knowledge. Even abstracts and indexes were in a primitive state until the late 1960s and non-existent in some disciplines. Although not clearly understood by the profession, much of its professional skill rested in practice on a deep knowledge of the local collection and significant practical experience rather than on a set of generic rules or skills. There was a clear sense of partnership in the academic life of the institution. An unequal partnership no doubt, but nonetheless a partnership.
What one can then see with hindsight is the paradox of an increase in ‘professionalism’ but a loss of public need for the core skills of the profession. Librarians now are much less clearly partners in the academic enterprise and much more a provider of services in an increasingly hierarchical relationship characterized by the division of university staff into ‘academic’ and the very pejorative ‘non-academic’. We have all the power and influence of the Head of Residences and Catering and a budget much less important than that of Estates. Libraries have arguably never been better run. Professional skills have been blurred as more managerial competences have been eagerly acquired from other areas. Financial management, marketing, strategic planning, technology, training have all been eagerly adopted and practiced as research libraries grew in scale and complexity. This has led to a poor differentiation of specialist (information-related) skills from generic ones shared with other professions. At the same time the growth of the internet and its associated tools such as search engines has led to a growing public view that the library is only one of multiple sources of information, while there is a growing body of evidence that users would rather interact with search engines than people. A recent OCLC student survey showed 92% satisfaction with this approach. When librarians tried to help, satisfaction dropped to 84%. OCLC attribute this to our eat spinach attitude. Cataloguing and classification, the twin arks of the professional covenant, are increasingly seen as of little value, even by librarians, having in effect been replaced by natural language searching. Google is now seen as displaying the attributes of moral integrity, confidentiality and neutrality previously the hallmarks of the profession. We can see that this passing of trust has weak foundations as Google collects masses of information on individuals which have been passed on to government. Interestingly this is happening at a time when librarians in the United States display huge professional courage and resist the Patriot Act’s requirement to pass on user data to government agencies.
And so finally we come to the Naughties, the locust years when in my view what had been the drive led by the JISC for change led to the growth of a dependency culture which has offered a substitute to original thought. We became obsessed with handouts – Follett and e-lib and JISC grants, Non-Formula Funding for the Humanities grants, RSLP access funding. Rather then deal with the mushrooming growth of born digital material, we preferred to digitise the paper collections we already had and to sit in committees with publishers negotiating site licenses as an alternative to developing some philosophy of e collection building. We created digital overlap strategies.
Ruth story - digital overlap strategy
But at least we kept the plates spinning in our well ordered and managed worlds.
The future
So where too next? What does the future hold?
A recent major Guardian collected a range of generally upbeat views from senior managers. It claimed that the technological developments ‘have put the library back at the heart of teaching, learning and academic research’. This seems wildly optimistic given the general decline in many of the measures of library usage. A major issue for library managers is that most of the university no longer need to darken the library’s doors. Funding and policy decisions are increasingly made by those who do not use the library. And yet one very common response has been to build new library buildings (often rebadged as things such as resource centers) without any clear idea of their future purpose or function. It is no longer clear what business libraries are in and where they interface with other activities. As a result, entrenched organisational settings give rise to organisational clashes as new activities emerge which don’t fit historical patterns. We need to step back and look at all of this from a higher level and not only commission yet more reports on matters of detail. Libraries have substituted means for ends and have not stood back and considered what is in interest of universities. The bundle of functions which constituted a library has changed, but there is no new consensus on what the new bundle is or might be. The Library was a set of activities developed to minimise transaction costs. Now that almost everything needed for day to day life is on the web, can we shift transaction costs? Can we move on from that to see what categories of function are distinctive and form our USP? Perhaps common vanilla stuff should be outsourced, while other activities such as CRM, product innovation and digital asset management should form a new core of business. There seems a certain inevitability that once thirty million or so volumes are available on the web, the question will be asked whether a university need a library at all. Lorcan Dempsey has – as always – perceptively commented that what we need to consider is not adding to the services we have, but reconsidering what services we should offer and what should be our USP
The underlying trends are fortunately relatively clear. They are towards ubiquity and portability. Wireless technology, the convergence of PDAs, mobile phones and laptops and government policies aimed at delivering broadband to the home all lead to a situation of great power being put in the hands of individuals. Much of higher education’s power base has depended on the concentration then aggregation of resources. Knowledgeable teaching and research staff, laboratories and libraries have provided a magnet which draws students and research. The technology at least theoretically removes that advantage. The growth of simulations whether for chemists or lawyers, digital libraries and webcams mean that it is entirely possible to create a virtual university.
Google (and others) have begun much publicised and huge programs of digitization of the paper collections which already exist. What is less well noticed is the uncontrolled growth of born-digital material in all institutions. A simple list would include: Research papers, Conference presentations, Theses, Wikis, Blogs, Websites, Podcasts, Reusable Learning Objects, Research data, e-Lab books, Streamed lectures, Images, Audio files, Digitized collections, e-Archives, e-mail, HR Records, Student/staff records, Corporate publications, National heritage artefacts.
All of these are growing. No-one controls them all; policies for selection, preservation, curation and access are not in place or generally even discussed. There is an obvious role here for information services staff to develop new content systems and to revivify the fundamental skill of the organization of knowledge.
And yet there is something of a paradox here. Institutions in general and libraries in particular have in recent years focused on client- and service-oriented approaches. This has led to services aimed particularly at students and in support of teaching. Service to academic staff has diminished in that many, perhaps most, academics acquire their information at the desktop. Nor is it often obvious to the individual academic that the information has been acquired, licensed and managed by librarians. This focus on commercially available material has moved librarians well away from their roots. There is no debate on, no theory or philosophy of, the curation and preservation of born-digital resources. It is at least possible that some institutions will allow the management of digital resources to be diffused amongst a number of parts of the university and that the library will cease to have any real function other than that of museum. There is a very real need for professional leadership and debate on this future. Some of this debate is emerging from within the professional educators rather than practitioners, as Sheila Corrall demonstrated earlier.
Universities create and consume information and knowledge. The development of technology has both globalized and increased that creation and consumption while quite plausibly creating routes which allow information users to bypass what were previously centrally provided services. Staff involved in the provision of information services have found the skill sets they require, on the one hand changing at an impossibly rapid pace and on the other merging and overlapping. Web managers, content management system managers, repository managers, VLE managers and so on can be employed by any or all of the units which constitute these information services. Perhaps oddly while the majority of universities have brought together all their information services in single management structure, only a very few have attempted to break down the traditional departmental boundaries. Linked to this is the absence of any emerging view of what type of staff should be employed and what skill sets they should possess. Career paths are no longer clear, but at least there is a general commitment to developing generic management and leadership skills. Personal and softer skills are perhaps more valued by interview panels than are specific professional competences, if only because the life-span of such professional competences can be measured in months rather than decades. The organization of knowledge will remain a key requirement for universities, but where and by whom it is organized is a much more open question. It can only be a question of time before a university outsources library provision to a third party as no longer being part of the core business. A more cheerful view is that the information profession, however defined, will move past its mid-life identity crisis and define a set of skills and competences in managing locally produced e-resources; for quality-assuring externally accessed data and for teaching information literacy. This provides the core of competences which would ensure a settled and satisfying career. How and where those skills will be taught and assured remains a much more problematic question.
In the end I personally think that the skills will be based on a completely refreshed set of activities which focus on what we do best.
Firstly e-collection building – the organisation of knowledge. More particularly we need to look at how we add value and aggregate and manage and add metadata. Having said that the judgement of ability in 1969 was how quickly you could get out of cataloguing, it’s ironic now to find that what we need is more cataloguers. Crucial to this management of born digital material will be its bibliographic authentication, its metadata tagging and above all its aggregation. We need the electronic equivalents of UBC and UAP to create an electronic information architecture. Computer Science has big ideas in the shape of the semantic web to manage this. Where is librarianships big idea? Wendy Hall from Southampton has just been made an FRS for her work on the semantic web. Which of you will be made an FRS for your work on the knowledge web?
The second critical activity for the future is, I believe, information literacy – user instruction. Not very controversial but pivotal none the less.
Thirdly we need to develop a basis for virtual reference services – focusing on kite marking, quality assurance and branding rather than trying to keep up with whether Facebook or Twitter or Second Life is the breakthrough technology. Some of you will remember those conference papers arguing that gopher or WAIS was the way ahead and the web would never catch on. Underlying principles and not technology is what we need to focus on.
And fourthly we need to focus on getting back to working together again and not competing for the biggest handout from JISC or HEFCE or Wellcome. Now the green shoots of that revival are clearly there. I’m immensely cheered by initiatives such as UKRDS and the Shared Services initiative, not to mention Open Access and repositories and the stuff like SHERPA and ROMEO which sit behind it. But we need to work out how all the pieces will fit together to form a coherent and necessary service. It’s when we work together and aggregate that we are out our best, most productive and most useful.
Librarians are at their best when co-operating. And they are inveterate optimists. That optimism was seen in an e-mail which crossed my desk at the end of last month. This e-mail was circulated through the medical library community at the height of fears over swine flu:
From: Jennifer Cassidy [mailto:jcassidy@WESTERNU.EDU]
Sent: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:27:16 +0100
Subject: Pandemic planning handbook
Does anybody have a disaster planning handbook that specifically
addresses pandemics? I'm looking for examples of business continuity
plans (e.g. how we will be able to continue to serve our customers if
the library/university is closed down).
Anything that addresses libraries response to pandemics will be helpful.
Thank you,
Yes we co-operate even and literally unto the death.
And just to close as I finally reach the knackers yard known as consultancy. Thanks to those of you who made it good fun – and to the rest of you who made it interesting.