The Australian Library Journal
volume 50 issue 1

Editorial

The Journal is Fifty in July this year: for half a century it has recorded the dreams, controversies and issues which have engaged the profession, and has provided continuous commentary, not infrequent irritation and occasional humour on those many issues which have engaged its readers over that period. Fifty years is a long lifetime for any publication, especially one which focuses on a single profession, a profession, moreover, which has experienced great volatility in its lifetime. It is not too much to say that ALJ was the creation of one extraordinary individual, who with others brought the predecessor of the Library Association of Australia, the Australian Institute of Librarians, into being. He was firmly of the view that any profession worth its salt should lay claim to a literature, and that a serious periodical devoted to that literature was a hallmark of the profession's maturity.

The contribution of John Metcalfe to our professional heritage is long overdue for assessment: perhaps somewhere in one of the many schools which followed one of his other projects, the School of Librarianship at the University of New South Wales, into existence - a proliferation which, incidentally would have astonished him, and which might have led him to reflections on academic profligacy - some scholar is beavering away at the authorised version of his life. Until the fruits of that labour see the light of day, we must be content with the occasional glances afforded by his Editorship of this journal, his not inconsiderable writings and by any personal reminiscences that those of us who knew him might care to offer.

I will open a column in the next issue in which any recollections of Metcalfe that readers care to volunteer will appear. For my part, I did not see the man himself until I had been a member of the profession for three years. Up to then he had existed for me as the dark satanic figure who repeatedly disparaged my efforts to master the logic of cataloguing and classification [of which he was the prime source and sole arbiter] in the Registration Examination: it wasn't until he published his two monographs that I could come anywhere near mastering his deeply complex style of thinking and utterance.

At any rate, I first encountered him in the flesh via the ferrule of an umbrella, which he was thrusting at my midriff. As a library cadet, I had been assigned as a security guard for the reference collection at the opening of the new War Memorial Cultural Centre in Newcastle, whose motto was, probably still is, as ambiguous as some of Metcalfe's own utterances. 'In minds ennobled here, the noble dead shall live'. The then city librarian, Lindsay Miller, himself no small mover and shaker whose horns were often locked with Metcalfe's, entertained a fairly pessimistic view of the morality of the average public library punter, and saw them all as potential depredators of his collections. Hence my posting as a security guard. We had been especially briefed to be on the lookout for seedy-looking men in grubby mackintoshes with possibly capacious pockets.

One such had drifted into my field of vision [Miller had also been a military man and had drilled us in the sentry's art of observing without seeming to observe, and of scanning our surroundings without moving our eyeballs]. This figure then proceeded to assault me with said ferrule, saying 'Is it alive? Does it breathe?' which provocation I endured for some time, but eventually I told him to be off: with a characteristic sarcasm he withdrew. It wasn't until some considerable time later that I realised I had missed a golden opportunity for a full and frank discussion on the inequities of the Registration Examination and the utter incomprehensibility of his views on cat. and class.. Or the chance to, quite legitimately, according to my standing orders, simply scruff the founding father of Australian librarianship and haul him off to the boss, thus no doubt bringing a faltering and not at all promising career to an abrupt close. I saw him on and off until he died; after he retired he was often out on the road with Jim Bennett, and it was a challenging task to select books under his enquiring and often disputatious eye. His dress remained totally casual, not to say scruffy. He once turned up in Jim's company with a tortoise they had picked up somewhere on the road.

On one of his visits to Hobart we made a video of an extended interview with him, and of a discussion with students at the School of Librarianship at the then Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. He was in great form as he delivered his views on the evolution of the profession, salted with probably libelous comment about some of the pundits he had met in Australia and overseas. Metcalfe was often acrimonious in debate, both in person and on paper. The tape, unfortunately, along with many others including interviews with a number of visiting poets including Philip Larkin and Peter Porter, was apparently discarded after the TCAE library was amalgamated with the collections of the University of Tasmania Library.

For those who wish to develop their acquaintance with 'Such individuals as Metcalfe, energetic, charismatic, commonly accepted as influential in determining the direction taken by important events, [who] are always to some degree, perhaps necessarily, quixotic' we would recommend Professor Boyd Rayward's scrupulously and informatively edited Developing a profession of librarianship in Australia; travel diaries and other papers of John Wallace Metcalfe, published by ALIA Press in 1996. Professor Rayward gives us the most comprehensive picture of Metcalfe, who speaks for himself throughout, yet to hand.

In this issue, the first of this Jubilee Year [for ALIA as well as this journal], we publish three papers on aspects of education for the profession: Patricia Gannon-Leary and two of her colleagues give us an overview of national vocation qualifications and their implications for the profession - a UK point of view. Dr Ross Todd and Niki Kallenberger reflect on a shared teaching-learning experience embedded in the workplace at the State Library of NSW, and Professor Ross Harvey muses over some of the problematic issues facing both educators and practitioners in current university education for the profession. Margaret Lambert gives an account of one college's involvement in moving towards information literacy with indigenous students [and incidentally of a thriving partnership with industry]. Eleanor Jackson-Bowers, Julie Henderson and Mary O'Connor review a mentoring scheme in South Australia and Fiona Salisbury and Judith Peacock compare two universities' approaches to the coordination of information literacy programs. Richard Sayers provides a comprehensive mature and largely optimistic review of the convergence process as university libraries, computing and IT services come together in attempts to present a seamless pattern of access to information wherever it resides both in the university and outside it. Dr Gorman has roused his erudite reviewers from their holiday slumbers and we have yet another batch of interesting reviews for you.

One other thing 'Back-up!; back-up!; back-up!' I recently had a most unpleasant experience with my thitherto rock-solid reliable PC. It stumbled [so I rushed to christen the zip-drive] and then it fell over. Terminally. After a week of intolerable frustration and angst, between the stumble and the collapse, I gave up, and took it in to town. I got it back: my files, including those for this issue, were saved and restored, but all in all I lost ten days and much of the work that I had done on this issue. All of my e-mail archive vanished. No reasonable explanation for all this. The hard drive was sound as was the rest of the hardware. But the dreadful phrase 'code-rot' had entered my vocabulary. If it hasn't yet entered yours, find out how to use your zip-drive. Now.