The Australian Library Journal

Editorial

John Levett

Knowledge what?

It is because information and information skills have usually been fragmented in organisations that a gap has grown between the real information needs for decision making and the information captured and delivered through the organisation's systems and services.

Reading this lead quote while in the process of preparing copy, I was moved to reflect on my own recent experience. For the last five months or so, I have been working as an editor in a Commonwealth agency which is in the process of being established in Hobart as the focus for the implementation of a major plank in one aspect of the Federal government's environment policies. Coming as it does on the heels of Strait to the Future, the 8th Specials, Health and Law Librarian's Conference held in Hobart late in 1999, and which I attended, it is an interesting experience to be working in an office with no resident information professional and with nothing like a library on site. In one sense, everyone here is an information worker: in another sense, no-one is. The Canberra-based library of the parent department of the office I have been working in, does have an effective IT presence, with many useful links, and I have experienced it cybernetically through its well-organised and accessible website.

My workplace is immersed in a sea of information, with well-established connections (through which much information flows) to other Commonwealth agencies and organisations, as well as to the multitude of non-government organisations active in its area of interest. Its contacts and connections are of both a formal, even legislative kind - and informal, ranging from accidental contact to relationships between individuals that have been established for a long time. Information flows freely across and through the system. But this occurs without the actual presence of any information professional. To me, this presents an interesting paradox. All that I have believed and advocated in my profession seems not to be relevant here. Scientists talk to scientists, managers to managers, and minnows like me to other tiddlers; none of us seems to require an information agency on-site in order to function effectively. True, I have had to buy or bring in from my own collection working tools like dictionaries and I have occasionally had recourse to the State Library of Tasmania, which is just around the corner. I also access the parent library through its website, and not the least valuable connection it has given me has been to several online dictionaries of acronyms, ignorance of which might be more immediately noticeable in the public service than a poor grasp of grammar. I have also discovered an interesting innocence of what we presently call 'knowledge management', the mapping and sharing of that knowledge which is abundant in the office and present in the minds of those who work there. So far, it doesn't seem to matter: we have operated more or less privately from discreet offices in central Hobart, and very little of our actions in this establishment phase have had any direct impact on the community or the stakeholders. As one would expect, the public hardly knows that we exist, and there is as yet little pressure on us to deliver information to it. But by another paradox, many of the delegates to a recent meeting in our area of interest listed stakeholder access to information as a very high priority for those many and diverse organisations, sectors and individuals who would be involved in, or affected by, the processes which will evolve within our jurisdiction. None present had any suggestions as to what the information and databases might comprise, where they might reside, who would maintain them or how they would be accessed and by what protocols: there was just this widely expressed and inchoately felt need for future access to information. The need is also present in the minds of the nucleus of senior staff here, a scientist, a manager and an economist, who have just called a meeting of representatives of about thirty sister agencies in Canberra in order to reveal, discover, and map the information resources relevant to our domain which might reside in those agencies. Access to these will no doubt be effected by links from our website, as is presently the case through the parent site and its 'blue pages'. But that is only a partial solution. Any outside enquirer will first have to access our home-page, then [if authorised] browse through the perhaps hundreds of links available in order to make any progress towards finding the required information. On many websites, such links are not well annotated and are therefore somewhat opaque to the outside enquirer. Our problem has two major aspects, access and management. Access by a variety of searchers to information that has already been picked up, logged, described and located, somewhere in the extraordinary and informal network of which we are a part, and management of the knowledge which is endemic, though largely invisible, within it. As with most government agencies nowadays, especially those operating with an absolute minimum of in-house staff, it is likely that the devising of a solution to this need will be outsourced to another government agency, or to private practice. It will be interesting to observe the process and to speculate on the nature of the brief that might be used to shape any tender or expression of interest. Meanwhile, I wonder how it can be that the information managing professions: archivists, records managers, website designers, librarians, database managers, information managers, have so far remained off-stage? It cannot be for lack of example in the context of government and specialised information agencies: as I noted of the specials whom I met in Hobart late last year, they are an extraordinarily diverse, flexible, competent and successful cohort. They have had to be in order to survive. So why is it that the management of knowledge is not yet a primary concern in the minds of the managers in such a context? How is it that the need for thesauri, a classification, indexing and mechanisms for the future management, organisation and retrieval of the incoming tide of information remains unacknowledged? In how many other similar contexts is this the case, and what are the implications?

In this issue, a pleasing range of contrasts. Anne Galligan illuminates for us some aspects of the political context in which the National Library of Australia has operated over its evolution. Professor Fiona Macmillan casts a detached and not unworried eye over the implications of the looming federal legislation on digital copyright and what it means for libraries and researchers. Catherine Smith takes a conservator's view at a fragile and valuable cultural resource, the music in our libraries. Trish Milne looks at the increasingly important phenomenon of 'knowledge management'. Anne Hazell speculates about another essential element, our food, and how adolescents are introduced to it in the novels which they read, and the eclectic Tony Marshall shares some of the contents of his well-stocked mind in a tour of colonial gastronomy. Jan Gaebler closes the innings with a report on a recent seminar for educators: her observations give us much to ponder about. And Dr Gorman's regiment of assiduous reviewers has been as active as ever. I have been speculating about the intriguing process of reviewing, its lures and its pitfalls, about which more in another issue.

One more thing. This is volume 49 of The Australian Library Journal; from time to time in 2001 we will be ranging through its interesting history, speculating about possible futures and looking over our shoulder at its extraordinary founder, John Metcalfe.