The Australian Library Journal
volume 50 issue 3
Editorial
John Levett
Keeping in touch
I am sometimes told: 'being the editor of the Journal must mean that you are very well informed...?' and at one time I would have answered in the affirmative without equivocation. I routinely received sets of the General Council papers and attended, as a matter of course, its meetings, and I was across most of the issues which lay in the public domain and some of those that did not. Now I am not so sure. Alert readers will have deduced that I was unaware that ALIA's Board of Education had been closed down as a consequence of the General Meeting last May, and I have been searching my mind as to what the implications might be. Had I not been reading my inCite with sufficient attention? ALIA's website is rich and informative, although it occasionally shows signs of stress, but somehow I missed the critical announcement, and more importantly, I had not picked up the vital clues by way of background. Had I been too relaxed about accessing the ALIA website for information on current developments? Am I becoming too isolated from the professional mainstream? Was the fault mine? What might I do to prevent a recurrence? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that I, as both a general member of the Association and the editor of its Journal, am kept adequately and properly informed about matters of interest to my readers? What are the layers of the information onion, and where did I place in relation to them?
So far, I don't have too many answers, but I am reasonably certain that the information - for whatever reasons - hadn't reached me, and I hadn't reached it when I drafted the May editorial. On 17 August Alan Bundy, the Association's president, sent me a letter which I hope to have his permission to reproduce elsewhere in this issue by way of completing the loop; that letter gives me much more information than I had previously been able to locate, and I am grateful for it.
As a member, I do not expect to be informed of every decision that is made but if I have a particular interest - as in this case the Board of Education - it is not perhaps unreasonable to expect to be able to find out more about it. ALIA's generally reliable and exceptionally informative website has let me down for once. I've just been to it and the inference which a naïve enquirer might draw is that the Board is alive and well. But it isn't: see Imogen Garner's justifiably plaintive letter elsewhere in this issue. Nor am I the only individual to be so misinformed: see Don Schauder's letter to inCite 9 August 2001 p5: '...under one of the world's best quality assurance regimes maintained by the ALIA Board of Education...'. Don is not a remote and isolated member: he holds a chair in one of the major universities in this country, with a large and complex department reaching across several disciplines and a number of levels. The fact that he was not aware suggests that critical information is not being reticulated as effectively as it might be. I am not being critical of the Board of Directors or of ALIA's executive director and her staff; nevertheless it feels distinctly odd. Not that ALIA the association as distinct from the incorporated version was always as open, transparent and as even-handed in the distribution of information as it might have been; there have been occasions in the past when there were definitely several circles of access to the Association's information, and an attitude in the General Council which made some of the Association's own policy statements on freedom of access to information ring a little hollow.
What are the implications in the current circumstances? Without access to the papers which doubtless informed the recommendation by the Directors and the decision taken at the general meeting, I can have no idea what the justification might have been. This is a curious situation. I am like a shareholder who feels that the executive of the organisation in which she has invested her money is not taking her seriously enough. Is this one of the consequences of the new model of the Association, which is now in fact, if not in name, no longer an association, but more of a company with all the implications that attach, including management by a board of directors who may or may not be my peers? Possibly it is not peculiar to ALIA: certainly my credit union (and I have been a credit union member for almost as long as I have belonged to ALIA) is showing some of the same attributes in that I have pretty well ceased to be treated as a member, and I am now in its eyes, I suspect, merely a customer, that necessary inconvenience.
I do not underestimate the difficult position which directors of any incorporated body now find themselves in: nor am I in any way disparaging those generations of volunteers, including the incumbents, whose contribution is 'above and beyond'. I do not seek privileged access to information or to material that for a variety of reasons, might be judged to be confidential. But I would wish, as both the editor of this journal, and an ordinary member of ALIA, to be better informed than I am. If the fault is mine, if the cloud of ignorance is somehow of my own making, then I would be pleased to be informed how to dispel it. But neither I, as a member, nor the Association as that body which represents my interests and those of the profession to which I still belong can function effectively without access to information, routine or critical.
I write the above with some diffidence and considerable difficulty: it may be that the fault is mine and that I have missed some perfectly obvious link or clue. If so, I would be pleased to be corrected or instructed. If not, then perhaps the issues to which I have referred are not peculiar to myself but reflect a more general situation, in which case, some further debate would perhaps be salutary.
In this issue: Larry Amey takes us back to the heady days of Munn-Pitt and headlines; Russell Cope gives us a characteristically understated and reflective review of Nicholson Baker's explosive Double Fold: libraries and the assault on paper; Sam Kaima, an effervescent colleague from Papua New Guinea offers an account of the bibliographer's challenges in a country where much of the culture rests still on the oral tradition; Laura Molino reviews the provision of information to people with disabilities in NSW; Maureen Nimon offers her response to the challenge offered by Ross Harvey in February; and Gray Southon and Ross Todd review the professional issues emerging from the phenomenon of knowledge management (phenomenon or fad? Read them and find out). Dr Gary (Gazza) Gorman, our reviews editor has left the Roos to fend for themselves (and they are obviously missing his support) and has gone back to his alma alter, Vietnam, for a spell, thoughtfully leaving as he went, this quarter's batch of reviews, headed by Robert Barnes' considered examination of Peter Cochrane's Remarkable occurrences; the National Library of Australia's First 100 years 1901-2001, a must-read book (and review).
And a fine crop of letters to boot.
An apology: In the editorial of the May issue, I took the Board of Education to task for failing to respond to Ross Harvey's hard-hitting article in the February issue. The previous chair of the Board, Imogen Garner, has written to inform me that as of the May AGM, the Board of Education had ceased to exist; her letter to me is published elsewhere in this issue.
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