Information professionals in Australia

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Information professionals inAustraliaRoss Harveya

a Ross Harvey BMus (Hons), PhD, DipNZLS, ANZLA,ALAA is a Senior Lecturer in the GraduateDepartment of Librarianship, Archives and Recordsat Monash University. He taught at the LibrarySchool of the National Library of New Zealandand has worked in various New Zealand libraries,most recently as the Newspaper Librarian at theNational Library. He has published in the fields ofmusicology, newspaper history and preservation.His most recent publication is Preservation inAustralian and New Zealand Libraries: Principles,Strategies and Practices for Librarians, 2nd ed.(Wagga Wagga: Centre for Information Studies,Charles Sturt University, 1993). He is Joint Editorof the Bibliographical Society of Australia and NewZealand Bulletin.Published online: 28 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Ross Harvey (1993) Information professionals in Australia, TheAustralian Library Journal, 42:4, 300-308, DOI: 10.1080/00049670.1993.10755662

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049670.1993.10755662

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Information professionals in Australia

Ross Harvey EMus (Hons), PhD, DipNZLS, ANZLA, ALAA is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Department of Librarianship, Archives and Records at Monash University. He taught at the Library School of the National Library of New Zealand and has worked in various New Zealand libraries, most recently as the Newspaper Librarian at the National Library. He has published in the fields of musicology, newspaper history and preservation. His most recent publication is Preservation in Australian and New Zealand Libraries: Principles, Strategies and Practices for Librarians, 2nd ed. (Wagga Wagga: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 1993). He is Joint Editor of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin.

Manuscript received July 1993

This paper ascertains current concerns and directions of the library sector of the Australian information profession by analysing papers presented at recent Australian conferences.189 papers from three conferences were assigned a total of 421 subject descriptors, which were grouped into more general categories. From these, five primary areas of concern were identified: electronic services; the quality and value of services offered; Australia's neighbours; traditional management concerns; and traditional concerns of the library profession such as education, collection

development, and bibliographical control. This analysis suggests that the language currently being used to express professional concerns is that of business and the marketplace, with little to indicate that important questions relating to issues like public service and equity of access to information are being addressed. The paper was delivered at CONSAL IX, the Congress of S. E. Asian Libraries, at Bangkok in May 1993 and will be published in its proceedings.

T HE topic which I am to address today is, potentially, of enormous scope. If I were to take it literally, I would have to take account of all who work

with information in Australia. I have chosen a narrow defmition here of'information professional', which includes, in the main, librarians. I will demonstrate later in this paper that most ofthose who could be termed 'information professionals' in Australia are still largely employed in traditional types oflibraries or in closely-related occupations.

I have made no attempt in this paper to provide lessons for CONSAL members of the information profession. To do so would be unproductive and even arrogant. To give one reason, this paper will be largely occupied in trying to define what the information profession in Australia is currently concerned about: it is by no means certain that what Australian information professionals

300 THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1993

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do is the best for Australia, and so may not be a useful example or model for others to follow. We in Australia have to first put our own house in order. How much you select from what I describe here is entirely up to this audience. I hope that you will take what you want from it and adapt it to address your own local problems, just as Australian information professionals often solve their own local problems by taking what they want from American and British practice and adapting it to Australian conditions. A second reason is that if there is one lesson which Australians have started to learn in recent years, it is that of increased tolerance of the aspirations of other cultures. This lesson is starting to be learned as a result of the increasing number of non Anglo-Irish cultures which have taken root in Australia. This, too, I will refer to in more detail later in this paper. Analysis of conference proceedings

My approach in this paper was to pretend that I was an outsider to the information profession in Australia, and taking that point of view, to try to find out what this profession's concerns are at the present time. The method I used was to analyse conference papers presented by information professionals at the major Australian conferences over the last two years. In this way I should be able to get a good general indication of major areas of concern and should be able to ascertain the current preoccupations of the profession, the direction in which its members think it is heading, and what it encompasses. I also examine some other evidence - particularly the last few issues of the major periodicals read by Australian information professionals-to help to refine the picture.

The conferences whose published proceedings I have selected are:


• Information Online and Ondisc 93: the 7th Australasian Information and On Disc Conference, Sydney, 19-21 January 1993. The theme of this conference was: Making the Connection: the Electronic Frontier.

• Australian Library and Information Association 2nd Biennial Conference, Albury, September 1992. The theme of this conference was: Libraries: the Heart of the Matter.

• 4th Asian Pacific Special and Law Librarians' Conference together with the 9th Biennial Health Librarians' Conference, Canberra, September 1991. The theme of this conference was: Achieving Excellence. The second and third of these are bien

nial conferences, and so the 1991 proceedings of the special librarians' conference is the most recent available.

I noted above that any definition of 'information professional' is potentially very wide. What, in practical use, does the term encompass in Australia? To attempt to answer this I noted the designations and places of work (that is, type of institution) of those who presented papers at the three conferences above. The precise breakdown is noted as Table 1. In almost every case they fit clearly into traditional types of libraries and, within that, into traditional library positions. Most can readily be categorised as working in, for example, community libraries, academic libraries, public libraries or government special libraries. Others are less mainstream but still, nonetheless, familiar: consortiums (such as Technilib and Unilinc in Australia or OCLC in the United States), international bodies (such as IFLA and UNESCO), and the book trade. Less traditional positions include privately employed speakers such as consultants or those who operate

THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1993 301

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Table 1 Papers analysed by affiliation of author

Type of institution or affiliation Number of papers

Academics (Eg Lecturers) 31

Book trade 1

Community library

Community special library

Consortium 4

Corporate special library 7

Government special library 27

Health library 13

International body 3

Law library 5

National library 9

Non member of information profession 8

Private/Commercial 15

Public library 3

Regional public library 2

School library

State library 7

Student 1

TAFE (Technical & Further Education) Library 2

University library 35

Unspecified 3

businesses which service the library sector. There are also, as expected, non members of the profession, usually speakers who are invited to address conferences on wider issues.

My use of the term 'information professional' in this paper to mean primarily those working in traditional types oflibraries is based largely on the evidence from these conference papers. My view is, I believe, reinforced by the following list, taken from the 1993 brochure of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's Department of

Information Management and Library Studies, of some position titles which come under the generic heading of information specialist. Their list is: information manager, librarian, database manager, archivist, media centre manager, cataloguer, project manager, information analyst, information officer, special librarian. Most of these are recognisably traditional library positions.

You might ask where the professions of archivist and records manager fit in my view of the information profession. I consider them to be part of this profession, of course, but a separate sub-discipline. I have chosen not to include them here because in Australia they are well organised with their own professional associations such as the Records Management Association of Australia and the Australian Society of Archivists, and have their own distinctive and separate education and training courses (some of which are offered at my institution, Monash University).

My methodology of analysing conference proceedings has many deficiencies, some of them considerable. For example, it applies only the very crudest ofbibliometric techniques, using imprecise totals as evidence and taking no account of nuances. I have of course assumed here that published conference proceedings contain all of the papers presented at that conference: this is not usually correct, and I know definitely that it is not the case for two of the three conferences I use as examples here. It is possible, too, that the themes selected for each conference limit the ability of professionals to present their real concerns; to counter this point, though, it is probably valid to assume that the conference themes were selected to represent the general professional concerns of the moment. More positively, however, I believe that


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conference papers can be assumed to contain a reflective, rather than merely practical, view of professional practice. They are therefore a valid and effective way in which to provide an overview of information professionals and their activities and concerns in Australia at the start of the 1990s.

My approach, then, was to take the papers from the three conferences and to assign to them specific keywords which describe their contents. These keywords were then grouped into more general categories from which the main concerns of the profession were deduced.

The total number of papers examined was 189:91 from the ALIA Biennial Conference proceedings, 26 from the Online 93 Conference, and 72 from the Special Librarians Conference 1991. There were 421 keywords assigned to these 189 papers. The keywords were assigned either by the authors of the papers (for some of the papers presented at the ALIA Conference) or by myself. No attempt was made to impose any order on the keywords, for example by selecting them from a controlled vocabulary such as a thesaurus; they were, rather, selected mostly by using the terms present in the papers or abstracts of the papers where these existed. An indication of the kind of keywords selected can be gained from those listed in Tables 3 and 4.

The keywords were then classified under general headings. This classification, loose though it is, reveals trends from which useful conclusions can be drawn. The headings used in this classification, together with the number ofkeywords which fit into them, are listed in Table 2.

Table 3 lists the classified keywords ranked in order of the number of times they are represented. This data enables some


Table 2 Classification of keywords

Classification Number of keywords Australia's neighbours 25

Australian-specific issues 9

Bibliographical control 10

Career concerns 32

Case studies 10

Collection development 13

Copyright 3

Databases 22

Education, Training 19

Electronic services, etc 53

Gender issues 6

General issues 15

Heritage, Preservation 6

Integrated library systems 12

Law libraries (not classified elsewhere) 4

Management 34

Marketing, Promotion 12

Networking 14

T epics represented by one keyword only 8

Publishing, etc 5

Quality of service 40

Specific user groups, User attributes 25

Types of libraries 27

Value of information, Services 17

Total 421

trends to be discerned. If we exclude the non specific categories such as Types of libraries (which includes papers which describe a specific library or type oflibrary) and General issues (which includes such keywords as European library policy, Library history, and Society) we are left with these categories as the most significant:


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Electronic services, etc 53 Quality of service 40 Management 34 Career concerns 32 Australia's neighbours 25 Databases 22 Education, Training 19 Value of information, Services 17 Networking 14 Collection development 13 Integrated library systems 12 Marketing, Promotion 12 Bibliographical control 10 Table 4lists the keywords encompassed

by the first five of these categories so that a clearer idea of the scope of each category can be gained.

Concerns of the information professional in Australia

And now to the crux of this paper: what does this analysis indicate about the preoccupations and concerns of Australian information professionals?

It is, I believe, possible to clearly identify five primary areas of concern: • Electronic services (categories: electron

ic services; databases; networking; integrated library systems; networking);

• The quality and value of services offered (categories: quality of service; value of information, services; marketing, promotion);

• Australia's neighbours (category: Australia's neighbours);

• Traditional management concerns (category: management);

• Traditional concerns of the library profession (categories: career concerns; education, training; collection development; bibliographical control).

Table3 Classified categories in ranked order

Classification Number of keywords Electronic services, etc 53 Quality of service 40 Management 34 Career concerns 32 Types of libraries 27 Australia's neighbours 25 Specific user groups, User attributes 25 Databases 22 Education, Training 19 Value of information, Services 17 General issues 15 Networking 14 Collection development 13 Integrated library systems 12 Marketing, Promotion 12 Case studies 10 Bibliographical control 10 Australian issues 9 One only 8 Heritage, Preservation 6 Gender issues 6 Publishing etc 5 Law libraries not classified elsewhere 4 Copyright 3 Total 421

It is the first three of these -electronic services, the quality and value of services offered, and Australia's neighbours -that I want to note in more detail here. In doing this I do not mean to imply that the two remaining categories, which I have designated as 'traditional', should be dismissed out of hand. They are significant in that they indicate that the information professional in Australia is still, to a considerable extent, concerned with what is 'traditionally' carried out in libraries. There does not


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Table4 Keywords included in some classified categories Electronic services, etc 53 occurrences 5 each Imaging 4 Expert systems 3 CD-ROMS Electronic journals, Publishing; Electronic library; ISDN 2 Communications; Hypermedia, Hypertext; Office automation; Technology; Television open

learning Computerisation; Computers; DVI; Electronic data; Electronic access; Electronic document delivery; Electronic access; Email; GUI; Information technology; Networking CO-ROMs; New technologies; Optical disk storage; Optical character recognition; Paperless office; Scanners; SGML; Technological change; Technology assessment; Telecommunications; Virtual library; Z39.50

Quality Of Service 40 occurrences 7 each Performance indicators, Measurement, Effectiveness 6 Excellence of libraries 5 Total quality management 4 Quality of service 3 Quality assurance 2 Action research; Accreditation of libraries; Standards

Effectiveness; Efficiency; Collection performance; Evaluation techniques; Evaluation; Journal evaluation; Library evaluation; Measurement; Program evaluation:

Management 34 occurrences 4 each Library management; Management 2 Leadership

Budgeting; Change; Collaborative management; Corporate planning; Financial planning; Human resources; Innovation; Law libraries management; Library buildings; Managers; Managing innovation; Organisational structures; Organisational change; Resource allocations; Resource management; Response to change; Strategic planning; Team development; Work flow; Policy writing; Autonomy vs Centralised services: Building planning: Integration: Operational planning

Career Concerns 32 occurrences 4 each Image of librarians; Occupational health and safety 3 Industrial issues, Relations; Career paths, Structure 2 Skills transferability 1 Burnout; Freelance employment; Job sharing; Multi-skilling; Myers-Briggs type indicator; Part

time work; Professional role; Professional expertise; Recruitment; Role of academic librarian; Salary levels; Scholar-librarian; Transferability of skills; Workplace; Workplace reform; Consultancy

Australia's neighbours 25 occurrences 3 each Pacific law resources 2 Developing countries; Indonesian libraries; Law material - Pacific 1 Asia-Australian relations; China -libraries; Malaysian literature in Australia; Pacific material;

Pacific region; Pacific; Pacific- networking; Papua New Guinea; Philippine literature in Australia; Regional library cooperation; Singapore libraries; Singapore literature in Australia; South East Asia; South-West Pacific; Vietnamese; CONSAL


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seem to have been a dramatic change in the concerns of the 'old-style' information professional (that is, librarian) to the information professional of the 1990s. Modem information professionals are concerned with management issues such as budgeting, financial planning and policy writing, just as their predecessors were. They are also concerned with, and consequently discuss at their conferences, topics relating to their own employment and advancement such as occupational health and safety issues, part-time work and career paths, again just as their predecessors did.

Differences we can deduce from this analysis, are: • the tools by which the traditional mis

sions of the information professional are carried out

• the need to justify to political and commercial masters the existence of the library or information service

• a growing recognition that Australia is no longer simply another part of the AngloAmerican library tradition, but has links with and interests in the Asia and Pacific regions.

Electronic services This category is wide-ranging. It is con

cerned with discussions of the electronic tools themselves (keywords such as CDROMs, Optical character recognition, Hypertext, Imaging, Scanners, Online databases, Integrated library systems, AARN et, Internet), the way in which services have altered orneed to be altered because of these tools (Electronic publishing, Electronic library, Networking CD-ROMs, Online searching, End user searching, Resource sharing), and aspects of telecommunications (ISDN, Communications, Email, Z39.50).

The quality and value of services offered Many of the papers were concerned with

assessing how effective are the services offered by information professionals. Was the service being offered of the highest quality? How can one measure the quality of service? Keywords indicating these concepts abounded: Performance indicators, Measurement, Effectiveness, Quality assurance, Evaluation techniques are some examples. More general management concepts, in particular Total quality management, were frequently noted and applied to information services in these papers.

An associated concern was with the value of information services. Here the concerns expressed were with how to place an economic value on library or other information services (keywords such as Cost-benefit analysis, Value of information services, Cost of online services, Life cycle costing), discussions of what could be considered essential services and what could be charged for in the new economic climate in Australia (Economic rationalism, Added value, Equity of access, Fee for service), and how to better present information services to those who use them and pay for them (Marketing, Lobbying, Customer support, Public relations).

Australia's neighbours These conference papers indicate an

increasing awareness of the physical location of Australia in the southern hemisphere and, more specifically, with its closest neighbours being in the Pacific and in Asia. Keywords used illustrate this graphically: for example, Indonesian libraries, AsiaAustralianrelations, China-Libraries, Law material- Pacific, Malaysian literature in Australia, and of course CONSAL. The


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Australian information profession is beginning to follow the lead of Australian government policy to promote closer links with the Pacific and Asia.

What the current periodical literature indicates

In order to attempt to verify whether my generalisations from the conference proceedings were valid, I examined the contents of the 1992 issues of three Australian periodicals to see if there was any major change from my hypotheses. These periodicals were selected because they fell into the category of generalist library/information periodicals and so could be expected to cover the full spectrum of the information professional's concerns. They are: • ASL: Australian Special Libraries • Australian Academic and Research

Libraries • Australian Library Journal.

ASL:Australian Special Libraries has 13 major articles in its 1992 issues.lf we exclude those which deal specifically with the concerns of the special library (such as services and organisation of a special library), one case study, and general articles, nine are left. Five of these fit comfortably into my category of quality and value of services offered, and two, which deal with full text databases and library networks, into the category of electronic services. Two papers, significantly, are concerned in part with the concerns of information professionals and these illustrate my hypotheses.

Issues for information management noted by Elizabeth Orna include three which deal with the economic value of information, one which covers the role of information technology, and two noting the quality of services and its measurement.1 Rishpal Singh Sidhu's paper has as two of its major


subdivisions 'Impact of information technology' and 'Measuring the value oflibrary and information services' and under the heading 'Changing role of information professionals' notes 'Marketing, promotion, and user education' and 'Involvement and leadership in IT [Information Technology ]'.2

Australian Academic and Research Libraries is, on further examination, not a very useful example as in 1992 two of its four issues were special numbers, one dealing with state libraries and the other with university libraries. Of its 25 major papers 12 were specific case studies of state or university libraries. Of the rest, four were concerned with electronic services, three with assessing and improving services, and two with resource sharing. Again, two of the three main concerns are present to a significant degree. Australian Library Journal shows a similar balance. Of its 31 papers for 1992, seven were clearly in the electronic services category and two in the category of quality of service. (There were, incidentally, also four on traditional aspects oflibrarianship such as bibliographic control, and another four on library history.)

Two further points are worth making. The first is the award ofthe Australian Business Woman of the Year 1993 to Alison Crook, the Director of the State Library of New South Wales. The report of this award in the Australian weekly publication The Bulletin makes frequent use of terms like information technology, client focus, user service, accountability. 3 The second is that the themes chosen for two of the three conferences whose proceedings are the basis of this paper are themselves indicative of the concerns of Australia's information professionals. Thus we have, very much to the point, 'Making the Connection: the Electronic Frontier' for the Information


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Online and Ondisc Conference 1993 and 'Achieving Excellence' for the 4th Asian Pacific Special and Law Librarians' Conference, 1992.

Conclusion I think that it is fair to conclude from

this evidence that information professionals in Australia are currently largely concerned with implementing electronic services, with making the best use of the new opportunities which these electronic services can provide, and with improving the quality and value of the information services they offer. To a lesser but still significant degree, they are also concerned with their role in the Pacific and Asian region. They are still concerned with the traditional interests and values oflibrarians, and indeeddespite renaming their profession from 'librarian' to 'information professional' or 'information specialist' - they are still largely employed in the traditional roles which librarians played in the traditional types of institutions.

What is also significant, I conclude, is the language that the concerns of the Australian information professional are expressed in. It is very noticeable that the language ofbusiness and the marketplace and the vocabulary of the economist is used. But I feel that there is something missing. There is little in the sample of the professional literature which I have used in this paper to suggest that the information profession is concerned with re-examining its traditional values in the light of the current economic and business milieu: in other words, it has adopted the language, the jargon if you like, of the business world but has not yet fully assimilated the philosophy. There is little concern evidenced for

the traditional library materials which still form the bulk of our library collections and which are likely to do so for the foreseeable future, that is books and other material printed on paper, nor is there much evidence of concern for the traditional users of information services. We do not seem to be asking the questions: Whom do we serve? Why do we serve them? These questions seem to me to require better answers before we can usefully ask questions about the quality of the service we provide.

In my opinion what is missing from these papers is the language of public service, of the right to knowledge, of free access to information, of equity of access to information. The debate now seems to be about how much to charge those who want information services, and no longer about the need to educate and the right of all citizens to free information in order to promote democracy and to enhance the quality of life. I wonder if library professionals in Australia have lost something important from the past?

References

1. Elizabeth Orna, 'Information policies for organizations: Challenges and opportunities for information professionals' ,ASL: Australian Special Libraries v.25 no.l (March 1992): pp.3-17.

2. Rishpal Singh Sidhu, 'Special Libraries: Current trends and prognosis for the future' ,ASL: Australian Special Libraries v.25 no.4 (December 1992): pp.125-135.

3. 'Business Woman of the Year: Alison Crook', The Bulletin (27 October 1992): pp.28-30.


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Information professionals in Australia