AARL

The successful future of the librarian: bookman or knowledge worker?

Herbert S White

Abstract: Peter Drucker's description of a new profession of 'knowledge workers' and Andrew Osborn's call for 'bookmen' offer very different career directions for professional librarians. Knowledge workers are individuals who take the responsibility not only for informing end users about what they ought to see, but even more importantly what they need not bother to look at. This field, involving not only evaluation of information but filtering is now gaining its predicted strength, but there is no indication that librarians desire to compete for any part of it. Osborn's bookmen, by contrast, concentrate on the acquisition and bibliographic analysis of important materials, and it must be assumed that the term 'book' must now be broadened to include all types of information formats, both printed and electronic. However, librarians are now doing much less bibliographic analysis, transferring this work to the eventual end user. If librarians are then left only with acquisition, however defined, it is essential that they perform at least this task as effectively and rapidly as possible. This includes not only how materials are obtained for permanent future use, but increasingly how we request what was not originally selected and is now wanted, either for permanent retention or for temporary one-time use.

Because I suspect I am probably not well known to Australian academic and research librarians, a few words of explanation about my background will help to explain the viewpoint of this opinion piece. I worked for the first 25 years of my career as a special librarian and as an executive in the field of special libraries and information centres. This included US government agencies such as the Library of Congress (LC), the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It also included corporate assignments in the aerospace field and at IBM.

What began as a fairly routine career as a corporate librarian evolved into the management of highly complex computerised information facilities which, at least to me, and despite the exotic nomenclature, were still libraries. During all of this time I say my primary job as helping individual users to find answers in an, even then, growing and increasingly complex information file.

I understood that my clients (I preferred customers to define the relationship more clearly) were usually almost helpless in finding useful information in a sea of obsolete and useless information. I understood almost immediately, and my customers appreciated that understanding, that what they wanted was usually not a lot of material, because they did not have time to sift through a lot of material. They wanted as little as necessary, and they wanted it fast. I understood then what efficiency experts have always told us - that the most useful collection is a small collection which contains everything which is wanted and very little else.

What is not useful gets in the way of finding what is useful. I discovered, much later, that academic professors understand this instinctively. This is why they remove from the library all of the material they think they might want again to that most perfect and small of all information collections, their own office. For them, the best academic library is the one they never need to visit, because they have already removed what they are likely to need. Some professors have even bragged to me about the success of their tactics.

My career changed, and I spent the next 20 years in a large university as a professor, dean and, ultimately, distinguished professor. At Indiana University I was in one of the largest and most prestigious schools of library and information science. My teaching still dealt with issues facing special libraries and information centres, and with general management concerns. However, the area of my investigation broadened to include all library and information collections, particularly academic libraries. This was not unnatural. After all, I was located in the middle of a major academic library, with holdings of more than four million. That library, and others I could observe, became my laboratory, and the librarians, most personal friends and many soon former students, became my laboratory rats.

The basis for my observations is inevitably American. However, I believe that all of this applies as well to Australia. I have been to your country a number of times. We share many values, even if some have different levels of magnitude.

My first American observation, which I initially found strange, was that academic librarians desperately wanted to be seen as anything but librarians. They sought to be recognised as faculty colleagues and fellow scholars, or at worst fellow teachers. In this they generally failed. Faculty members (and of course I was now a member of that club) did not value individuals who sought to be pale imitations of themselves. In any case, such an effort would have been doomed from the start. Faculty have assigned hours in the classroom of at most nine or ten hours per week. The rest of their time is free for research, contemplation, writing, and for that matter anything else they want to do. Librarians, by contrast, worked fully scheduled work weeks. When were they supposed to do all of the things for which 'real' faculty had incredible flexibility? I realised even then that if librarians were to receive credit, it would be for what they could do uniquely and faculty could not.

My second observation was that my new faculty colleagues were really not very different from the clientele I had served in industry and government. Like their colleagues in the private sector, who also frequently had earned doctorates, their emphasis was for the most part not on basic research but rather on applied research, particularly if their work was supported by government grants and contracts. Applied researchers do not usually look for raw materials, they look for support for hypotheses already stated, hypotheses which probably helped them to obtain funding in the first place.

It was of course possible to come up with conclusions which invalidated these hypotheses, but such an end to their research made further support highly problematical. The romanticised view of research, in which individuals like Marie and Pierre Curie make significant breakthroughs 'by accident', is better left to film writers. Academic research is fierce and competitive stuff, just as it is in industry. The winners are rewarded, the losers fail to be promoted and perhaps even to be tenured. The Curies were not funded by the French Académie de Sciences.

I found that academic faculty, just as my corporate and government customers, began with low expectations of the potential value to them of librarians, and this puzzled me until I realised that even government and corporate researchers 'learned' through their own student university experiences what librarians were and were not capable of or interested in doing. Their expectation can be related, perhaps unkindly, to the biblical role of subservient tribes, as hewers of wood and carriers of water.

'Good' librarians were the ones who made sure we never ran out of wood or water, and who fetched it, if not rapidly, at least without spilling it. Best of all were those librarians who saw to it that our own lodges (the faculty offices) were already stocked with whatever wood and water we might desire. If this comparison sounds harsh, I nevertheless think it is accurate.

In the corporate setting I had worked very hard to make two points to my clients, and in this I think I was largely successful. The first point was that I knew a great deal that they did not know, and the second was that they needed my expertise or they would fail. I stress that all of this had emerged simply from my observations and survival strategies, without the support of research.

I did not acquire the research background to explain to me why the library profession in general, and academic librarians in particular, were so stubbornly suicidal, until I started the second half of my career as a teacher, researcher and scholar. I will readily confess that the names Andrew Osborn[1] and Robert Downs meant little if anything to me until I was almost 50. When I was told Downs' famous quote 'We will be remembered not for the service we gave but for the collection we left behind us' my first reaction was to consider it a joke. Why would anyone who aspired to be a professional want to be remembered for having accumulated a large warehouse? Massaging all of that information for ease of bibliographic access would make a difference, but Downs never mentioned that.

To be fair, Downs, Osborn, and their fellow collection builders lived in a different time. They could not really anticipate an information environment in which books were only a small part of the total mechanism for information dissemination, and a small and slow part at that. At least they should have seen that the term 'bookman' would become both narrow and hurtful. With the use even then of microfiche and microfilm the term 'information man' might have been preferable. Special librarians were even then dealing with many other formats including technical reports, engineering drawings, patents, and art slides.

Research librarians, at least in the United States until the late 1960s, lived in a time in which funding research collections for the sake of having larger ones than rival institutions really mattered. Use of the material was never formally assessed by any library, and as I will note later there are faculty who resent such an assessment even today. It didn't really matter then. Competitive library building was a major academic sport. The shift in emphasis to larger football stadiums came later.

If anyone realised that the larger the harder it is to find what you really want, they didn't care to be reminded. To a considerable extent this kind of thinking exists in the present, and I can't be sure whether academic librarians taught the faculty, or whether they simply accepted what the faculty wanted to hear. A study headed by Allen Kent analysing the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh revealed that the great majority of the library holdings were never used during the year of the study. Bradford's Law of Distribution tells us that material not used in the first year is even less likely to be used in future years. The study findings did not surprise me. What did surprise me was the fury with which the study results were received by the University of Pittsburgh Faculty Senate. How dare anyone do a study of the use of material in an academic library? What possible correlation is there between the use of items in the collection and the value of having them there?

I will willingly grant that Downs and Osborn concentrated on material which they thought would be useful, but the greatest game was and still is the numbers game. How many volumes do we have compared to university Z? Are they gaining on us, are we gaining on them? The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) continues to publish such statistical tabulations, which are examined as feverishly as the Monday morning football standings.

And yet, there is both hypocrisy and absurdity in these statistics. Has anyone noticed that the nth million item acquired is always identified as a work by one of our own faculty, and never a 19th century work by an obscure author? Are the University of Pittsburgh faculty aware that studies by Peter Hernon and Charles McClure demonstrated that the likelihood of obtaining today what the library owns is at best 50%? Some of this material has disappeared, and even if the material is in the hands of a faculty member who is reluctant to part with it the library will not voluntarily attempt to obtain another copy for the second requestor. In some cases, he would be better off if the library did not own a copy at all. Has any librarian at the University of Pittsburgh told the Faculty Senate how wrong and foolish they were?

I remember a conversation many years ago with a colleague whose field was high energy physics. I told him that we shared one characteristic, and that there was one on which we differed. Neither of us knew anything substantive about the other's field, but at least I was smart enough to realise that I knew nothing about high energy physics. We have not only remained friends, but I know that he has told of this conversation to other librarians, because they have in turn told me. If faculty are totally ignorant about what happens in libraries and why unique talents are required, is it at least in large part because we have never told them?

Even if we can understand that Downs and Osborn defined the librarian as a 'bookman' within the context of their times, it is difficult to understand the totally trivialised role they envisaged for the professional librarians who worked with them in their university libraries, and who were not also bibliographic specialists. They relegated these other librarians to roles as clerks. They thereby also helped to support the premise, in existence in major institutions such as the Library of Congress and Harvard University, that 'any' scholar can run a university library, because there are plenty of librarians who can do the detailed work.

Can anyone imagine a comparable scenario in which a supreme court justice need not be a lawyer because there area plenty of lawyers to help with the details, or a surgeon general need not be a doctor? My view has always been that the most important qualification for any library director is administrative capability, in dealing with the priorities of both personnel and material resources. If specific skills in such areas as computer technology or scholarly acquisition are needed, and of courses they often are, such people can always be located and hired. We must hire competent ones, listen to and respect their judgement, and pay them well. However, they must also understand how their unique skills fit into the overall whole.

Whatever the arguments about a significant role for librarians simply as collectors of books might have once been, the discussion was made irrelevant by the development of much more rapid and much more informal methods of communication. As early as 1942, scientific advisors Vannevar Bush and Karl Compton advised President Franklin Roosevelt that the 'traditional' methods of communication, through books and journals, were totally inadequate for the rapid dissemination of military research information. The techniques, developed through the National Defense Research Council (NDRC) Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), consisted of weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports, disseminated simultaneously to all authorised recipients. My first job upon graduation from the Syracuse University Graduate Library School was the establishment of bibliographic control over the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of unique documents, most never reported anywhere else, which had been generated. Bush and Compton understood, as certainly librarians should understand, that the lag time between an idea being promulgated and appearing in a book is about seven years, and for appearance in a refereed journal about five years. For some fields such a delay can be tolerated. For many others, the information is obsolete by the time it reaches monographic form.

My first officially attributed publication, at the age of 24, was the Bibliography of Volume Seven of NDRC OSRD Technical Reports. It was entitled Fire Control, and it had nothing to do with putting out fires. It dealt with aiming guns. The significant point here is that millions of young professionals, in all allied countries, returned to their corporations and universities not only knowing about this new informal method of communication, but also preferring its use. To a great extent 'traditional' librarianship considered such informal and stapled communications as unworthy of recognition and retention. The special library profession in the fields of science and technology grew rapidly in industry and government to fill that vacuum.

It should also be noted that, whatever librarian reasons for concentration on collection accretion, publishers who make their living from what they sell us think they understand librarians very well. This explains the publisher attraction to monographic series, in which all volumes on a general topic are individually numbered regardless of their specific topic. They believed that few librarians could resist purchasing volume 17 when they already had 1-16 and 18-32, regardless of the specific title of this volume. It also explains the journal publishers' tactic of issuing 'Festschriften', separately priced but included in the issue numbering system. Who can resist having a complete set?

These examples serve to underline my point that the continuing growth in both announcement and delivery mechanisms, when added to the sheer growth in volume, make any attempt to collect everything not only fruitless but even mischievous, and if this is true for major US academic research libraries, it is even truer for smaller and younger Australian academic libraries. For the librarians, but particularly the end user, the great growth in announcement mechanisms makes the problem not one of deciding what to spend time looking at, but one of deciding what not to look at. Columnists and politicians have begun to note that we are drowning in information while we are starving for knowledge.

As a special librarian, I had always prided myself not on how much I delivered to my customers, but how little I could deliver while still fulfilling their needs. I never reported circulation statistics, because I considered these to be an inverse indicator of my ability to save the time of others. As early developers of computerised Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) systems for NASA in the mid-1960s, it was our job to inform about a thousand clients in many countries what documents, according to their computer profile, matched their expressed interest. We constantly asked recipients not only whether we had sent them meaningful notifications, but also whether we had missed anything of which they later became aware. We found that responses varied, from those who didn't mind being notified of documents in which they had no interest as long as we didn't miss anything, to those who didn't care what we missed as long as we sent them no more than ten notifications, and only for documents written in English.

The same wide disparity in preferences exists today, and it is probably tied to whether we are dealing with basic or applied researchers. Research libraries tend to treat all users as though they were basic researchers, although we now know that the number of these declines steadily. Student preferences, of course, don't matter at all, because students prefer multiple copies of just a few heavily used items. Acceding to that preference would not add to our 'credit' count.

That this created not only new but multifaceted roles for librarians should be evident, and indeed that point was made, albeit indirectly and without reference to librarians, by management guru Peter Drucker. Drucker noted 50 years ago that he saw the most powerful profession of the future as that of 'knowledge worker'. By that he meant intermediaries who would steer us toward the correct and most up-to-date information, and away from the vague, the incorrect, and the obsolete. In pinpointing this role of information intermediaries, Drucker was only applying the recognition of the growing role of specialists to make our lives less complicated.

We like hiring specialists to work for us, at least in part because hiring others to help us makes us feel more powerful. Society is full of examples. People who used to spend their weekends fine-tuning their cars now simply take them to the nearest service centre, at least in part because cars (like information files) have become more complex. In the United States a whole profession of tax return specialists has risen, not for corporations but for private individuals. Many of us hire others to do our yard work, because we would rather play golf or watch television.

In approaching end uses about the possibility of letting us do the screening for them, librarians must approach this topic with delicacy. My tactic was not one of telling them they were incapable of doing this work effectively (although I thought this was probably true), but to stress that their own time could be used more effectively doing what only they could do.

This issue arose for me frequently when I spoke at meetings of medical librarians. Who can search the MEDLINE database more cost effectively, a medical librarian or a physician paid five times as much? If the answer to my question is obvious, as medical librarians always considered it, then why have doctors not been instructed to stop doing what librarians can do at least more cost effectively, if not better? And if this is true for doctors, why have university provosts not made the same point to professors? When last I looked, cost effectiveness was still a desirable objective, even in academia.

Drucker was not the only one to recognise a role in the rapidly growing world of information screens or gatekeepers. In 1954, Alvin Weinberg, the director of research of the US Atomic Energy laboratory in Oak Ridge, forecast the need for a new professional specialisation within each area of science and engineering, and he felt that the best and the brightest should be drawn away from work in the laboratory and into information assessment. Weinberg was more prophetic than he could possibly imagine, because in 1954 nobody could predict with any accuracy or certainty the growth in information, the variety of delivery mechanisms, or the advances in computerised information alerting and in document delivery, including fax and satellite. Nevertheless, Weinberg's appeal fell on deaf ears. Engineers and scientists realised, quite correctly, that they would never receive as much credit for being information gatekeepers as for discoveries in the laboratory.

Weinberg never considered librarians for this crucial role. He simply did not trust them to be able to do this, and that problem still exists for us today. Do our users trust us to make decisions for them? To what extent do we even try to seek that trust? Librarians who are considered experts receive very high esteem from the people we are trying so hard to impress. I once called a friend at Indiana University who was a Shakespearean scholar to try to verify an obscure citation. He suggested that I ask a particular librarian, because that individual knew more about this topic than he did. Such respect cannot be demanded. It is voluntarily granted, or not granted at all.

Does librarianship see any changing or growing role for itself in this rapidly evolving environment? Certainly others, often inventing disciplines as they go, all with the word 'information' in them, have sought a part of this lucrative field. Some have succeeded, without ever deserving to. If we do not choose to become information intermediaries or gatekeepers, what do we want to be? Are we collectors, and if so of what? Only books, or information containers in all formats? Are we evaluators of what we have collected? Or of what we are considering perhaps collecting? The role of bibliographic specialisation has always been an important one in librarianship, and I suspect that Downs and Osborn certainly included it in their definition of bookman. And yet there is now clear indication that both the role and number of bibliographers is declining in major research libraries, as we shift our diminishing budget priorities to something else. To what, and is it of greater importance? Many academic libraries in the United States now offer undergraduates a workshop in bibliographic instruction, intending perhaps to make students more self sufficient, or perhaps to free ourselves of these annoying little pests. The scenario in public libraries is even more dire. Here patrons head straight for terminals, use them either successfully or unsuccessfully (we don't ask) and then leave. What does that make our role?

I used to take Indiana University library science students on field trips to Washington DC, trips which always included a stop at the National Archives. There a fascinating lady named Elsie Freivogel insisted on haranguing them for at least an hour, when I begged for release because of other commitments. Ms Freivogel wanted the students to understand the difference between librarians and archivists. Archivists, she stressed, collected and arranged material, all of it, for researchers and scholars who wanted to see everything in a specific narrow discipline. They would then decide what to do with it. Archivists were collectors and arrangers, and deciding what made sense was not their job. Librarians, Elsie argued, played a completely different role. They were dealing with clienteles frequently working outside their own increasingly narrow expertise, and these people were often unsure of what there was or what they were even looking for. Archival scholars, she might have said but didn't say specifically, needed collectors and arrangers. They needed bookmen. Library users, in all kinds of libraries, needed something else. As a former special librarian I already knew this was true for that discipline, but I began to realise how this might apply to academic and research librarians as well.

What then is the definition of our field, in the 21st as opposed to the 19th and even the 20th century? If we, as appears to me at this point, are hesitant, in defining and defending our unique roles as knowledge workers - if we prefer to allow faculty, students, and anyone else to do their own information searching online without our either knowing or caring whether they do it well or badly - then what do we see as the professional role of librarians warranting advanced education?

Abbott[2] states three general characteristics for any profession.

1. 1 Professions address human problems amenable to expert service. The key word here, of course, is expert. Professionals do what others cannot do, and what they clearly tell others they cannot, or even may not do for themselves. That is certainly true for the professions of law and medicine.
2. 2 Professions compete vigorously for new and emerging problem jurisdictions. Can there be any doubt that both the growth and ease of manipulation of information opens such problem jurisdictions? If we don't want to claim them, what do we want to claim instead?
3. 3 Professions seek to expand their jurisdiction by pre-empting the territories of other professions. Anyone who has ever worked in an academic setting knows how this game is played. As dean of what was at first a traditionally named Graduate Library School, I worked ferociously and successfully to claim the magic word 'information' in my school title and mission. So did the deans of most other library education programs, against the opposition of both computer science and business disciplines.

Having made and expounded on these characteristics in what is a thorough and scholarly presentation, Abbott offers a gratuitous aside. His mother is a librarian, and he notes that librarians not only fail to compete for their professional 'turf', but do not even seem to realise that a contest is in progress. Even if we think our role is simply the acquisition of information materials - and I certainly hope that at this point no librarian defines materials simply as books or printed items - what are we collecting, and why? Nancy Van House and Stuart Sutton have argued that libraries do not even attempt to collect information, but that they concentrate only on containers of information. Their example is that rather than claiming to be experts about wine, we only claim to be experts in the collection of wine bottles.

Even those still committed as a first principle to a librarian's role as collector of material must surely understand that this includes not only what you buy, but increasingly how you acquire later what you haven't bought. Given the variety of formats and the explosive growth of information itself, there is no way that any library, regardless of size or even of resources, can acquire everything which might be wanted before it is requested. The greatest issue becomes one of determining how to acquire later what you have not bought but now need, and here of course technology, in part the source of our problem, can also be very helpful. This we all recognise as the process we now call 'interlibrary loan'. I consider it an unfortunate phrase, because it tends to trivialise what is simply a classic management 'make or buy' decision. Should we now buy this, or should we obtain it simply for a one-time use? Either decision must be based on economic realities, and never on depending that someone else will find the time to do you a favour.

In 1976 I convened a conference of librarians, authors and publishers to discuss the implications of what was then the new US Copyright Law. One of the key speakers, Richard de Gennaro, then Director of Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania and later at Harvard University, dismissed librarian fears that the newly minted 'fair use' provision, which in simple terms meant that nothing could be borrowed on interlibrary loan more than seven times a year, would pose any real problems. De Gennaro argued that everything borrowed that often should have been bought, and that borrowing records could serve as useful acquisitions tools. He noted that almost all libraries, and particularly academic libraries like his own, owned lots of material which was used less frequently than that.

The problem in the inability to buy 'everything' in anticipation of probable or even possible use affects even major libraries such as Harvard University. It certainly affects libraries in less sparsely settled areas, and it affects younger libraries. That holds true in the United States, and it obviously also holds true in Australia. We have two ways in which to acquire materials. We can acquire them in the anticipation that they will be asked for (why would anyone acquire them in the anticipation of non-use?), or we can acquire them after they have been requested.

Now we still have two options. We can rectify an earlier 'mistake' by now obtaining the item for our permanent collection, obviously also making it available for use very rapidly upon receipt. Alternatively, we can acquire the material in anticipation of one-time use, by downloading it from a file, by requesting a copy via fax, or by requesting either the original or a copy through the most rapid transmission mechanism. If it is a loan it can be copied locally, and then returned just as rapidly. Generally, this can now be done within 48 hours from just about anywhere to anywhere, but it requires a major change in the philosophy of acquisitions procedure. It requires that we deal with the option of permanent versus temporary acquisition as a real economic option, and that we fund both from the same acquisitions budget. That also means that we stop counting what we 'own' as though we had just caught a prize fish.

As a professor who understood something abut what librarians did, I was never satisfied with the explanation that what I wanted was charged out, lost, on order, or in the processing backlog. My response was that I was not interested in an inventory report. I was interested in getting a copy, any copy, not necessarily their own. When could I expect to receive one? And, obviously, I did not expect to be charged a fee for what resulted from their own decision mechanisms.

Perhaps some librarians thought me unreasonable, and perhaps some readers will find me unreasonable as well, but I obtained surprisingly good cooperation, and whether this was as a special exception I did not care. I was only treating the academic library as my special library

What we now call interlibrary loan will work well if, and only if, we treat it as a normal business expense, and make the process worthwhile for the supplier. Those of us who work in the free economy understand that service is best when suppliers compete for that privilege. The fact that we now trivialise the process of acquiring what we did not or could not have anticipated needing ensures that the process will work badly and slowly. We generally do favours for others only after we have served our own clients, and that certainly seems correct.

Allen Veaner, the former director of major academic libraries in the United States, put the present process into perspective when he noted, in an article in College & Research Libraries, that librarians had done very little to improve the process of interlibrary loan, despite the availability of new delivery options. Instead, they had developed very sophisticated techniques for convincing users that it was only proper that they wait patiently.

It is time to provide a summary for this rambling discourse. Fifty years ago Peter Drucker predicted an important role for what he called knowledge workers, those who would evaluate and filter information to provide clients with the useful and protect them from the useless. Drucker was, as he usually is, correct. Forty years ago librarians could have claimed this territory without a contest, but that is certainly not true today. However, there is no indication that even now the library profession has an interest in such a role.

Information intermediation services are now provided under contract to government agencies, academic departments, and corporations, all organisations which have insisted that they had no money to support libraries. How do information intermediaries do their work? To a large extent, of course, on computer terminals, but they also use libraries. The park outside the New York Public Library houses a number of people who, cell phones at the ready, are prepared to use library facilities on behalf of clients who would rather pay for these services than perform them. I am sure the Library of Congress is similarly surrounded. Who are the individuals who work as contract employees undertaking bibliographic research and screening? Some of the better ones were originally educated as librarians, but they learned that as librarians they were not allowed to do this sort of work.

If we have no professional interest in information intermediation, then perhaps our interest lies in collecting and analysing materials for the ultimate use of others. If we do this, we must first rid ourselves of the restrictive nomenclature that suggests that we deal exclusively or even primarily with books. Information materials come in a variety of ever-growing and ever-changing formats, and to suggest that an information collection is now a collection of books would be as obsolete as suggesting it is a collection of papyrus scrolls. What Gutenberg once changed the computer has now changed again, and more changes are in the offing.

If libraries choose this narrower role, it could be hoped that they place an emphasis on bibliographic analysis, on making material easily accessible for the ultimate evaluation of end users. Perhaps ironically, this is exactly the role which Elsie Freivogel of the National Archives outlined for archivists instead of librarians, who she insisted would have to deal with a less expert clientele.

Unfortunately, there is clear evidence that even the librarian's skill of bibliographic analysis and compilation is falling by the wayside. Fewer librarians are now performing these tasks, and even fewer are being prepared to perform them. Instead we concentrate, at least in the United States, on bibliographic instruction. This means simply that we are preparing users to become self-sufficient but most directly it means that we don't want them bothering us. Several years as a grant proposal reviewer for the US Institute of Museums and Library Services have shown me that the greatest number of applications is not for hardware and software to increase librarians expertise, it is for tools to make users totally independent of us.

If we have neither the interest in providing information intermediation nor even professional analysis and arrangement, what does that leave us? Perhaps uncharitably, it leaves us as the keepers of the warehouse. Warehousing can be done well or badly, but I would certainly not consider it a profession which warrants specialised graduate education. Good warehouse keepers anticipate what their clients might want. If something was never acquired or is out of stock, they obtain it as rapidly as possible. Certainly they do not then impose a further delay by making the requestor wait while they 'process' the material into the system records.

All libraries, regardless of what else they do (and I obviously would hope that they do more) perform clerical functions of obtaining material either not in the system, or perhaps while in the system not available to the requestor. Why it is not available is of course irrelevant to the requestor, it appears only relevant to us. I have already noted that material acquisition, with present technology, can be accomplished easily within 48 hours. If we can't use online or fax techniques, Federal Express will suffice. If we are going to concentrate on running a warehouse, then let's at least do it well.

I can readily anticipate the objections. Won't any of these scenarios cost a great deal of additional money? Of course they will. I can respond with two statements. The first is a truism to any successful manager: 'It is easier to request a lot of money than just a little bit of money.' A proposal to hire ten additional online searchers promises an exciting and visible return. A proposal to hire five additional clerks promises nothing except continuing boredom for the decision maker.

The second statement is my favourite Peter Drucker quote. 'In the provision of any product or service which is considered crucial or essential, its cost becomes irrelevant.' I don't think I need to add anything else.

Notes

1. See, for example, R L Cope 'Andrew Osborn's The Library Keeper's Business: Its Impact and Relevance Today' Australian Academic & Research Libraries vol 33 no 2 2002 pp97-112
2. A D Abbott The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor Chicago University of Chicago Press 1988 p14

Herbert S White, Professor and Dean Emeritus, Indiana University. cornlgvaz@aol.com.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address).