The Australian Library Journal

The Harold White Fellowships: why can't librarians get up?

[editorial] John Levett
Since 1983, the National Library of Australia has offered fellowships, which since 1985 have been managed in honour of Sir Harold White CBE, the first national librarian, who retired in 1970. Under its auspices, the way is open for visiting scholars, writers and librarians to put forward proposals to undertake original research based on the Library's collections. Applicant category (iii) of the scheme is relevant;

Visiting librarians. Awarded to professional librarians, archivists or conservators wishing to describe, list, catalogue or carry out conservation work on particular collections or to study the methods and techniques used by the Library in acquiring, cataloguing, arranging, conserving or providing access to collections. The library will provide each visiting librarian with the cost of the cheapest return airfare to Canberra from his or her home and a grant-in-aid towards living expenses in Canberra. [Note the inclusion of archivists and conservators: in the discussion which follows, the term 'librarian' should be taken to include candidates from these cognate disciplines].

The Fellowships are not restricted to Australians, and many gifted overseas scholars have been awarded them. Fellows (and in what follows, this may be taken to include the category of Visiting Librarian) are required to work in Canberra and to spend at least three quarters of their time there, which seems reasonable enough, given that it is the collections resident in the National Library which provide the raison d'etre for the Fellowships in the first place. Fellows are given access to a room, to free photocopying, the use of a personal computer with access to the Internet, access to the bookstacks and after hours access.

The Fellowships are advertised annually inAHES andCampus Review (but not ininCite orALJ : nevertheless, there is usually at least one application for a visiting librarianship each year, about more which later), and there have also been brief articles or notices inABR,AHAB,HASN and inNotes and Furphies. The Fellowships are also listed in a number of grantsmanship directories, though not in as many as one might expect. Although this advertising coverage is limited, it seems to be effective, at least as far as the visiting scholars, writers and researchers categories are concerned, for there is usually a stable of 20 to 30 applicants to choose from. However, few librarians (apart from an annual flowering of pro forma and wildly optimistic overseas essays) apply, and as far as I can tell from a perusal of the record,not one has been successful.

The reasons for this may be conjectured. Firstly, the competition amongst the scholars, researchers and writers, is intense, and almost invariably, there are more otherwise acceptable proposals than can be funded in this category, and although it is not overtly the intention that it should be so, applications for visiting librarianships tend to be examined with the same rigour and in the light of the same criteria as apply to the scholarly categories. In effect, this means that in addition to the quality of the proposal itself, the fitness and potential ability of a candidate to carry out research is also brought under the scrutiny of the Committee, three of whose members are themselves quite senior academics representing the three Academies. Inevitably the research record and publishing output of scholar-candidates, many of whom are known to these members of the selection committee, is examined, and not unnaturally, applications from librarians fare badly in this process. Whether this is entirely fair is another question, but this is the way the system works at present.

It should also be noted in this connection that the terms defined by the National Library Council for the category of visiting librarianpredispose to tasks, rather than to research, which certainly seems to be reflected in the scant number of applications received. Almost by definition, then, proposals by librarians tend to be somewhat mundane, lacking depth, rigour and with not the slightest hint of glamour or intellectual excitement. When this is coupled with an invariably limited research and publishing output, it is not surprising that librarians fail to get up.

You may think that this does not matter, except to the disappointed candidates, and in one sense, you would be right. Good scholars mop up the fellowships anyway, and excellent work is nearly always done. But it may be that immense damage is done to that overworked, yet still important notion, theimage of our profession, and those of the conservator and archivist. Whether they were to say so (and they don't) or not, I suspect that the academic members of the committee, and the representative of the community of (non-academic) writers, go home with no very high opinion of librarians, archivists and conservators - at least in this connection.

It may therefore be argued,prima facie, that unless librarians are more successful in their applications, what is now a de facto circumstance may become policy: in other words, unless a librarian gets up soon, it is very likely that the Council of the National Library (not the Committee itself: the scholars are quite happy to go on scooping up the librarians' share of the awards) will begin to wonder why it bothers, and will delete even the category of librarian from the list of those eligible to apply.

Can this situation be remedied? The obvious answer is that we should do all that we can to ensure that seriously considerable applications go forward, and that trivial and mundane ones do not, or if they do, that there is a clear distinction evident. This cannot be regulated for, however and the task is therefore one of increasing and extending awareness, encouragement, support and advice. This might be done informally, as individual candidates seek counsel or it might be done in a more considered way, as is the case in the academy when higher degree candidates first begin the process of identifying and reifying a topic for research. Whether or not this is done collectively [that is for librarians, archivists, record-keepers and conservators] or separately for each profession, does not matter. The important thing is that it should be done. But by whom?

The temptation for ALIA would be to refer the task to the Board of Education: but the Board is specifically excluded from considering research degrees, and therefore it might be concluded that the task would lie outside its already extremely crowded agenda.

If there were such a body, it might be referred to a committee of the heads of university schools of librarianship, at least in the first instance. But the schools have strenuously resisted establishing such a colloquy in the face of other more pressing arguments, and it is not likely that this issue, important though it is, would persuade them to sit down at table.

The answer would seem to lie in some more informal body, comprising, ideally, representatives from those professional groups which fall within the ambit of the criteria. It would be the group's task to canvas and encourage applications in good standing and in good time, and to offer a source of counsel and advice, and to be a sounding board for and a promulgator of desirable proposals. It might, if requested, examine particular applications and advise on them. It could not of course debar an application, and could therefore safely be ignored by those candidates with the confidence and experience to do so.

As a first step, colleagues might like to obtain a copy ofInformation for applicants for Fellowships and theGuidelines for selecting Harold White Fellows published by the National Library and available from Mr Graeme Powell, Manuscript Librarian, National Library of Australia, Canberra ACT 2600, telephone (direct) 02 6262 1258, or fax 02 6257 1703. His e-mail address is g.powell@nla.gov.au If the problem is one of lack of awareness, rather than lack of interest or capacity, then all that may be necessary is for this editorial to widely read and commented on, and for those interested to acquire sets of the above documents and get cracking. It will be interesting to see what happens.

[The author currently represents ALIA on the Harold White Fellowships Committee].

In this issue, Sue McKemmish, an archivist teaching at Monash University, discusses the significance of documents as manifestations of self; Sandra Schubert, Julianne Cheek and Lynn Walsh examine ways of coding requests for information as a means of measuring and auditing the performance of a women's information service, and Phil Teece gives us an advance look at the paper on librarians and the categorical changes taking place in industrial relations which he will deliver to the coming ALIA Centenary Conference. A colleague from Malaysia, Shaheen Majid shares with us his findings on the staffing of agricultural library services in some developing countries; one of the new (and extremely promising) generation of students, Catherine Moffat, looks at the adaptation of existing collection development skills as they might be applied to an 'access collection', and Jenny Cram, who is fast making her mark on the professional literature raises some pragmatic questions about the performance management and measurement 'in a time of information-centred change'.