The Australian Library Journal

On the cusp

[Editorial] John Levett
In this issue we focus on the recent OnLine and On Disc Conference held in Sydney in January. It was the eighth in a series which has gained a high reputation as one of the Association's leading specialised conferences. It is a privilege to be able to publish two of the plenary addresses to that Conference, together with Neil McLean's visionary 'Locknote' paper. And by coincidence we had earlier commissioned a paper for this issue of ALJ by Dr Marianne Broadbent on the emerging phenomenon of 'Knowledge Management', a concept which also figured in all three of the papers mentioned. In addition we have canvassed the views of a number of those who attended.

There were many points of view expressed at the Conference, but all shared similar thrusts:

• that in order to survive and prosper, individual practitioners must learn to exploit the new an-hierarchical environment, in which extreme personal and professional autonomy, a capacity for risk-taking and a significant degree of entrepreneurialism will be essential.
• that librarians, with their long-standing awareness of and familiarity with the philosophy and principles of documentary 'knowledge management' ought to have a great deal to contribute to the current internet-focused debate;
• that this potential contribution was masked or obscured by a blurred public perception about what it is that librarians do and can do;
• that as a consequence, the profession should be considering a fundamental move away from the connotations of librarianship towards those of knowledge management.

ALIA has already acknowledged some aspects of these challenges in its name change: but it is also clear that this has not brought in its train the aggregation of interest which had been hoped for, nor the global change in attitudes, so that ALIA remains just one of many competing voices in the ether. Given this [and the current sustained and often vicious and unprincipled attack on the National Library of Australia] the current review of leadership issues in the industry is especially crucial. Of no less significance is the need for ALIA to use its platform as an accrediting agency to ensure that courses leading to basic or advanced professional qualifications are of a kind that will enable practitioners to survive and prosper in the increasingly competitive and technologically-focussed information arena. Already it is clear that mere possession of a recognised qualification will no longer automatically open the door to employment; that much depends on an individual's adaptability, resolve, flexibility and sense of the entrepreneurial if she is to find a toehold and survive in the increasingly unruly and unstructured information environment. It is clear that it is not only librarians who are at risk and under pressure to evolve their practices and ethos; other information intermediaries, as diverse as stockbrokers and travel agents, are in danger of being by-passed by those with direct access to transactional loci. In addition, the rule- and hierarchy-bound environments familiar to many of us, and the existence of which as a professional context may have been attractive to some new entrants to the profession, are now passe. Nothing can be taken for granted in this new scenario: individuals will be responsible for their own survival. In such circumstances, ALIA faces particular challenges: in education; in advocacy, in leadership.

Of critical importance will be the shaping of real alliances: with the generic professions such as archives and records management; with education and training institutions; with libraries themselves; the low representation rate of senior members of the profession in the offices, especially the General Council of ALIA, is a major and debilitating weakness as have been the occasional divisions between it and ACLIS. Hitherto, ALIA's relations with these other bodies have been informal and accidental. The time has perhaps come when some more structured alliances need to be formed, especially since it is clear that in the new climate of politics groupings of employees per se, will no longer be accepted as significant. The slide in trade union membership and the wholesale reduction of their influence and efficacy should convince us of that.

Not unrelated are the recently expressed concerns of some correspondents to inCite regarding the intensive competition for base-level professional appointments especially in metropolitan centres. Whilst it is not clear that the Schools are producing too many graduates, it may well be that they are not producing enough of the kind that will be comfortable in environments where, to quote Rebecca Lenzini, of a colleague:

...she has had to forget hierarchy, forget it! She has had to become solutions-oriented. She has been living without a job description or with an evolving job description, living in a world of ambiguity and not getting hyper about it. She has been collaborating with everyone; and in going all across the organisation collaborating, she has had to take total responsibility for her career Our profession has always laboured under the tension between the rule-centred demands of the catalogue-creators and the need to engage with the often wildly divergent focus of the information seeker. To quote Clifford Lynch: Think of your library catalogue or an abstracting and indexing database accessed through most current retrieval systems; it doesn't know what you've already seen, it doesn't know what it has already told you, it doesn't know whether this is your first time using the system or whether you use it every day. This is not a good basis on which to build intelligent systems

Hugh's advice to all of us young things there was that the user doesn't care if you have it, he said the user only cares if he can get it. So you're not done till you put it in his hand...

The basis of how organisations compete - their core competencies - increasingly centres around managing knowledge and knowledge workers. Where an organisation's performance is heavily reliant on knowledge work then knowledge management is pivotal. Knowledge work emphasises the use of professional intellect in activities which use individual and external knowledge to produce outputs characterised by information content.

It has been my long held view that the lack of training is one of the major obstacles to the development of the information services market. It is encouraging to see so many innovative initiatives being described and demonstrated at this conference.

However the task facing most of us in our respective organisations is enormous and there appears to be little acceptance at the corporate level of the resources and energy needed to overcome the lack of technical knowledge and skills at the coal-face. Librarians and information professionals have been traditional providers of such training and it is important that we consolidate our position by offering more comprehensive and meaningful programs.

To do so, we need to think through the means of incorporating training requirements into the strategic planning process and to think of new ways of presenting the case in a way that will win appropriate resources.

It will be interesting to see how far all of these concepts are engaged in the reshaping of our training and recruitment agendas, and in the evolution and moulding of the alliances which we will need to forge to carry us forward.

Given all of the above, it is pleasing to be able to carry an account [by Felicity McGregor] of the ways in which one library, that at the University of Wollongong, is coming to terms with the challenges of providing quality service. In her introduction, she states:

Quality management was formally adopted by the library in 1994 as a management framework compatible with established values and previous change programs. Despite considerable goal accomplishment in recent years, new strategies were needed to continue to build on strengths, and to assimilate continuous review and improvement as a means of managing future change.

And finally, an apologetic note to some of our contributors: before the possibility of running the papers from Online 97 emerged, we had already set a number of your contributions with the intention of running them in this issue: but it seemed to us that there was a degree of urgency attached to the wider circulation of the papers from and touching on the Conference. At the same time, it is interesting to note the extent to which some of those contributions in hand already reflected the implications of the Online papers as they recount initiatives being taken to grapple with the technology-driven shift in information-seeking behaviours; it is also pleasing to note the quality of contributions coming in from experienced professionals, library technicians and students.