The Australian Library Journal

Editorial

John Levett
Last year, I attended Strait to the Future, the 8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference, Hobart, 22-26 August. Over four days, I had an opportunity to listen to and work with these colleagues and I heard a number of visitors from overseas in discourse about generic and specific issues facing this sector of the profession. I have never worked in a special library, but I have been to several 'specials' conferences, and I have a long-standing admiration for the species. The majority work in 'OPLs', or one-person libraries. And they serve a client group with distinct and often highly focussed interests, and with very real 'bottom line' awareness. In order to survive, they must meet the expectations of their host group or organisation and deliver clear and measurable added value to its operations. The substantial reduction in the overall number of special libraries over recent years in both the private and public sectors may in part be due to the operation of this factor.

Be that as it may, their clients have quite precise and generally exacting workplace goals. If the library or information agency serving them lacks 'cred' or fails to deliver quantifiable assets, client support will evaporate and the library will close down. Or it will be replaced by a facility staffed and managed by an information professional [other than a librarian] who might be seen as having a greater capacity to deliver the goods. Such a possibility has an evident capacity to concentrate the mind, and the colleagues whose papers I listened to and later read, brought a pared-down precision to their examination of critical issues.

I listened, in part, as an editor, and as usual, with an ear cocked for material that might find its way to these pages. But before I began actively to canvass for papers, there was a jurisdictional issue to resolve: where was Australian Special Libraries, the logical place in which hard-copy versions of papers might appear? It seems that it is no longer being published, in part, I suspect because of the work-place pressures alluded to above. No longer do people in full-time jobs have any spare capacity to take on the editorship of a professional journal, and without an editor, the journal folds. This is a small tragedy, because the specials are a highly innovative and autonomous bunch and what they wrote and spoke about in August last year deserves a wide audience. They live and work closer to the sharp end of professional practice. Risk-takers all, and to survive, adept at divining, defining and meeting their clients' real needs, often before the client herself has identified them. They do stuff. But they don't have time to write about it [those who can do, do, and those that can't ... edit...?], and only the stimulus of a national conference allows for the considered sharing of thoughts, ideas and job experiences. And for the crystallisation of that experience by way of a paper. The proceedings have been available for some time on ALIA's wonderfully informative website, which has had such an extraordinarily beneficial effect on our communication and infocratic [you heard it here first] processes. But ALJ is the 'journal of record', and has as part of its brief the responsibility to reflect to any reader, present and future, what the preoccupations of ALIA and its members are at any given time.

So I negotiated access [which was readily granted] to the papers with the conference organisers. My only regret about the process is that I can only publish a small selection of the many excellent papers on offer. The selection is mine, and because merit does not come into it, every one of the papers being extremely publishable, my selection is idiosyncratic and eminently disputable. I have included all but one of the plenary papers partly out of courtesy, but primarily because it is so valuable to see what is happening in other countries. I have also run Kathy Saurine's moving tribute to Lesle Syme and the ideals she stood for. I would have liked to publish all of the papers. No correspondence will be entered into on this count, but I would strongly recommend that you visit the web page at http://archive.alia.org.au/conferences/ if you want to see just how partial my choice has been. I included a lay address in the shape of the well-informed opening speech by Sir Guy Green. I did so on its merits, but equally important, because informed and sympathetic perspectives by lay observers on what we do are all too rare.

Conferences are invaluable: they heighten one's awareness of the issues that face the profession and preoccupy our colleagues. They are a microcosm and a hothouse. They sharpen and stimulate one's apprehensions. They reveal [I refuse to employ the neologism showcase] in sharp relief and considerable detail just how clearly our profession sees the issues and challenges thrust at it by 'the new technology' and the dominant economic metaphor, and how it responds, as individuals and as a cohort. I was immensely cheered by what I heard and experienced at Strait to the Future. The conference was taut and professional and my - our - colleagues renewed my faith. They were ingenious, committed, and shrewd, in the best sense opportunistic and totally exemplary. Go to their next conference.