Most of us became librarians because of a simple fact, a unique aspect of librarianship that we tend, in the subsequent hurly burly of professional life, to forget. We became librarians because we were library users, and as users we knew that librarians work in libraries. Sounds simplistic, doesn't it? But think about it. Where do other professionals work? With what are lawyers (or barristers and solicitors) and doctors, associated? In the minds of the public, the users of libraries, librarians are linked with the institution within which they work. That not only sets us apart from the other professions but also from all those people in the commercial world who claim to deal in information but whose titles do not reflect the institutions in which they operate. When we tell people we are librarians, they know we work in and run libraries - and that is a powerful asset. The other powerful asset our profession has is that by and large our user population (whether it be the general public or the students of an academic institution) has free access to our services by right.

I believe I can claim that, despite some negative images perpetuated by the advertising industry, ouR public loves us. But instead of capitalising on that (and by that, in case you missed the inference, I mean us in a general, across-the-board, non-differentiated way) we, that is sectors within the profession, for many years have looked for ways to emphasis not the diversity within the profession (which is health) but an artificial sort of pecking order (which most certainly is not). A few weeks ago I was talking to an academic from Otago University and he commented on his surprise that when the University recently appointed a University Librarian the successful candidate was not the Deputy University Librarian but the very entrepreneurial Dunedin City Librarian. He expressed surprise because he said he' been told that librarianship was not a single profession, that there were in fact two professions in librarianship - academic and public - and that they were quite different! An interesting variation on the 'only a poor librarian becomes a public librarian' message that has floated around library schools and professional circles at least as long as I've been associated with librarianship.

As a public librarian (who moved into public libraries deliberately, on ideological grounds, from an assortment of educational libraries - school, TAFE and university) I have come against that opinion in a very personal way, but I won't belabour the point except to use it as a springboard to the next idea I want to share with you - and that is that there is little or no difference between the profession of academic Librarian and the profession of public Librarian. What does differ is how librarians react to the environment in which they operate and the effect that reaction has on the profession as a whole.

Here's where the personal view comes in. Although I have worked in academic libraries, and therefore have a hands-on insight into that work environment, I am going to address only the question of how the professional reaction of the librarian in the academic environment affects the profession in the view of the public librarian. I'll leave it to someone else - perhaps at a later meeting of this Association, to consider the corollary.

Academic librarians operate in a very structured environment. In retrospect, working in an environment where the composition of your collection is determined in advance by the curriculum, where your users are captive, and usage fairly predictable, and where the controls the institution has over the users are very strong, (think of all the wonderfully punitive measures it is in the power of academic libraries to take against a student who does not return books) seems remarkably easy to those of us who are faced with the awesome task of not only being information generalists, but of having to predict the unpredictable needs of the general public and the demands that public will make of the library's services and stocks next week, next year, next decade, next century. But when you look deeper and realise that because academic management style is largely reactive it becomes apparent that in an environment where it is difficult to be proactive one has to become very systems oriented, very scientific method oriented, very analytic, if one wants to make one's mark professionally. And that's the reaction we public librarians see in general. It comes as no surprise to me that it is the academic librarians who are the librarians who develop whizz bang mathematical formulae and who were in the forefront of the technology push of libraries and librarians.

It is a reasonable reaction of the reasonable and committed professional, to that environment. It also makes life pretty damn difficult for those of us who operate in a proactive environment, and who have to convince our financial masters (who are not only not librarians but who in many cases don't really understand the general need for libraries of some quality because they personally do not use, or in the worst cases, cannot conceive of any situation in which they might possibly need or want to use, libraries) that public library provision is as much an act of faith as a cost effectiveness exercise because libraries are more than just places where books and information are stored and disseminated. The services provided in a public library serve library users in fundamental ways, ways that impact on the quality of their lives and their ability to participate meaningfully in society. Perhaps the greatest effect the academic reaction has had on librarianship in general is the downgrading of the role of the librarian as conservator. Remember the rash of conferences and seminars avowing librarians are not conservators? Yet that is the other reason many of us went into librarianship - because we are readers, because we love books.

I have here a pile of photocopies of a paper I like all my staff to read and take to heart. It is called "The Love of books as a basis for Librarianship" by Arthur Bostwick and was read before a meeting of the new York Library Association 81 years ago. If you aren't familiar with it please take a copy afterwards. It's as relevant now as it was then. The closing statement of Bostwick's paper is one with which, from the human point of view as well as from the profession point of view, I absolutely agree:

...the Librarian who has never read or who, having read, has imbibed from reading no feeling towards books but those of dislike or indifference, is surely worse than lost - he has, so far as true Librarianship goes, never existed.

Bostwick defines a love of books as a love of their contents, a love of the universal mind of humanity as enshrined in print. I have also for you a poem of Clarence Day's which I have carried around for years intending somehow to translate it into a form suitable for framing.

In many ways our 'civilised' view of each other makes it difficult to look at our fellow man with the inner vision as well as the outer one, with the eye of the heart as well as with the eye of the intellect. It would seem that we need the mediation of the author to enable us to feel comfortable with an inner view of each other - so in that sense the role of the librarian as a keeper of stories is a vital one. In a world peopled with data merchants it is still the book which is the predominant ideas package. Librarians have a central conservative role to champion books and the ideas found in them, and this includes retaining in our collections items of worth, however infrequently used, for the users of the future. We have seen what has happened to the profession of medicine as it has progressively moved from being and art to being a science. It has become unnecessarily chemical and interventionist in nature and now medical schools, which for years have chosen candidates using the same criteria to choose candidates for mathematics and engineering degrees are starting to realise that they have a problem, a problem reflected in the profession by the high suicide rate among doctors in general and particularly among the most 'people-centred' sector of what should be a highly 'people-centred' profession, the psychiatrists, as well as by lowering public credibility.

While we still, as a profession, can recognise that thinking is an art, not a science, we must put the brakes on, must keep writ large on the credo of the profession that we cannot depend on computer enthusiasm to nourish the art of thinking. Our society seems obsessed with the self-defeating prospect of mechanising everything. We can offer what no machine can - a living mind, a human presence. That presence is particularly important in the public library and will become increasingly more so. I do not believe that computers will take over. Only 1% of the world's knowledge is in machine-readable format, about 80% is in print - the rest has never been written down. I defy anyone to read comfortably in the loo using a terminal - and only an idiot would try to use a terminal in the bath. Reading in bed wouldn't be the same either. I believe Public Libraries will flourish on less money, and there will be increasing pressures to charge for services, which may well be compounded by consumption taxes which would technically apply to not only the much debated inter-library loans charges but also to such fringe items as photocopying and fines. They will flourish because the 'illiterates' of the next decade will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn or relearn.

Self-directed learning is the way of the future. People will still enrol in formal programs at academic institutions but success in a rapidly changing high-tech world requires people to take more and more responsibility for their learning.  Public libraries are the only education facility open to all. They provide equal access to the whole range of human knowledge and are a vital part of the provision for life-long education for all members of the community. As such they must be nurtured and cherished and loved and funded - as must the professionals who provide the heartbeat of the institution. While celebrating our diversity we, as professionals, must also emphasis to our  selves and to the world at large our universal strengths and skills. We must defend our profession, not by becoming apologists for it, but by collectively ensuring that it attracts the best people, the personable visionary who is both professionally competent and emotionally and spiritually committed to the public service ideals of librarianship, and who still has a capacity to have fun at work.

I have never hear of any librarian being struck off the LAA role for malpractice or for conduct likely to bring the profession into disrepute. And perhaps in some ways one of the strengths of our profession is that, because we cannot guarantee a professional monopoly on the practice and tools of our profession, it is extremely difficult to pervert the course of librarianship. I do believe we must be jealous of our professional reputation. But we also need to feel very good about ourselves and what we do, and we should share that with others in allied fields. We can start by making short internships available in public libraries for those training to be teachers of the young - give them a few weeks in which they are storytellers and readers of books to children in libraries so that they are exposed to the idea of the importance and the fun of books and reading skills in a very practical way. We can carry on extending this idea to ever widening groups of people. Faced with having to cope with the day to day pressures of life in understaffed, underfunded, overtaxed libraries we sometimes forget we belong to an old and honourable profession. Public libraries and academic libraries had their birth at the same time in Alexandria.

I digress for a moment to remark that of all the disasters of the ancient world it is the looting and burning of the library at Alexandria that we still feel today, which, for example, the razing of Carthage is remembered only as semantic exercise - Carthago delenda est!). The large Alexandrian library at the Royal Palace (which was destroyed) and its small 'branch' a the temple of Serapis, which survived, underwent a very important process of development which has all but been ignored by scholars in their delights of its catalogues and arrangements.

From all appearances, the manuscript collection represented originally only a research tool for a limited group of scholars. Gradually, the number of users became larger and larger until it took on more the appearance of a modern university library. It represented another important step forward when, to those interested in scholarship, was added the broad circle of educated men in general. Thereby the library for the first time acquired a truly public character and no longer confined itself to serving as a place for work but existed now, to use Vitruvius' phrase - 'for the enjoyment of all'. After Julius Caesar's death his friend, Asinius Pollo, established the first public library in Rome in the Atrium Libertatis. Pliny said of him that he "was the first to make men's talents public property." It doesn't seem widely known that by the beginning of the 4th century AD there were 28 public libraries in the city of Rome and those were staffed so generously that the staff required their own physician. We haven't yet reached that standard at the Brisbane City Council Library Service 1700 years on!

There is a third quote, written over entrances to temple libraries in Ancient Egypt, which together with the just quoted "for the enjoyment of all" and "make men's talents public property" forms my library trinity: "for the nourishment of the soul". If we keep those precepts we cannot go wrong as librarians. I work in libraries because I have a simple approach to life. I long ago worked out that at base most things are very simple - it is our reaction to them that makes us believe that they are complicated. In life I feel we have one simple choice; we either want to make money or to make a difference. I cannot put the reason I chose librarianship and still continue to choose librarianship in public libraries as my profession better than did Joan Dobson writing in American Libraries in September 1984:

I am a Librarian because I want to be able to make a difference in peoples lives. Perhaps our clients, patrons students do not view us as professionals in the same way that they view doctors and lawyers because we wear so many cloaks.

To children we are storytellers, recipients of secrets, confidants who can answer questions. To parents we are providers of guidance, babysitters, child psychologists, lawyers, doctors and friends. To students we are counsellors, wizards of information, companions in the quest for knowledge. To the lonely, to the elderly, we are a smiling face, a host of that comfortable inn - the library

We are not given the same title by all people, but that does not make us less worthy in their eyes. We are not identifiable by outward baggage. We carry no stethoscope, no legal tome. We are the chameleons of the professional world. Perhaps it is our human compassion that qualifies us as professionals.