And a nice metaphor for the renaissance of Aslib. Founded in 1924 as the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux, gone through some hard times recently (as have many of our long-standing professional associations), and emerged revived as part of the Emerald publishing family. Its early history is recounted in an article by David Muddiman, and it played a major part in the development of the ‘British school’ of information science. We too often forget that our discipline has an important past, like the venues in which we find ourselves.

And be prepared for a change, because the format has changed. The organisers say that they are ‘focusing on the long-running Online Information Conference’ with a ‘scaled down exhibition area’.

In a way, this is back to the roots, I suppose. A conference with a few exhibition stalls in a West London hotel: just migrated to Victoria from Kensington over a thirty-five year period, and with considerably higher prices, even allowing for inflation. Whether the conference, with – it would seem – a much smaller exhibition with no free tickets, will still be so popular as a venue to meet people, and an excuse for Christmas shopping, remains to be seen.

But beyond these extensive and well-studied areas, there is the rather different area of information support for the novice practitioner; the person who, perhaps having studied a topic, now embarks on the practice of a new discipline, profession, activity or hobby. At a time when it is recognised that, in many contexts, the old ‘job for life’ is disappearing and we must all expect to continually retrain and reskill, when the old idea of apprenticeship is finding a new popularity, and when new ways of doing things constantly appear, this seems a particularly important topic.

Yet it is one which has been little studied. A recent paper examining the information behaviour and needs of novice practitioners in art and design is one of the few such studies. Others have looked at newly appointed academic faculty, and at junior entrants in various professions, for example a study of those entering practice as family doctors. However, there is no substantial body of literature on this aspect, and reviews, such as the various editions of Donald Case’s wide-ranging Looking for Information text, do not distinguish this group as a specific object of study.

This is unfortunate. It is all too easy to assume that new entrants to some practice or discipline are, in information terms, essentially the same as the rest of the practitioners of the field. But such studies as have been done show that, although there is certainly a large extent of commonality, there are also distinct differences. Novices have particular needs, particularly for a rapid entry into the informal communication structure – the social networks – of their area, and particular constraints of knowledge, time, resources, etc. This is an area which, in my view, deserves greater emphasis as an important field of study; and not merely because we want to enable new entrants to an area to become proficient as rapidly as possible. Habits, information-related as much as any other, are set at an early stage; and it is in everyone’s interest that novices start to take full advantage of information resources as soon as possible. This is surely an area in which research ‘impact’ (of which we hear a lot in connection with the evaluation of research and researchers) can truly be claimed, and it deserves much more emphasis as a topic for information research.

Alice Prochaska

It attributes some interesting views to Alice Prochaska, principal of Somerville College, Oxford, who notes that libraries and archives have invested huge resources in digitisation projects to make collections openly available and to protect fragile manuscripts from handling. Yet, Prochaska alleges, far from discouraging visitors, this had produced exactly the opposite effect, since scholars inevitably wanted to see the originals. Presenting a digital version of a rare object, perversely, increases the extent to which it is likely to be handled.

This tale reminded me of a talk I attended many years ago, by a senior executive in a telecoms company, who related his experiences of working virtually, at a time when this was unusual. His two premises were: “I used to have a paperless office, but I couldn’t find space for all the paper”, and “I used to work from home, but I couldn’t cope with all the travelling”.

Perverse as these ideas seem, they made perfectly good sense when explained. His paperless office was made possible by a variety of (for their time) new and exciting software systems. These enabled him to create many interesting new types of document, which he could not resist printing and storing. His home working environment, complete with email, videoconferencing etc., enabled him to be regular and informal contact with many more colleagues around the world than would ever have been the case had he sat in his work office, protected by his assistants. And so he felt he wanted to get on the plane and meet them face-to-face.

I have told this story several times, with the point that this was an early take on the effects of these technologies; as they become familiar, we will become happy with paperless environments and online relationships. But Prochaska’s points make me think again. As well as having a reputation as historical scholar, she has worked with the National Archives and the British Library, and latterly been librarian of Yale. I think we should seriously take her assessment of this paradoxical effect of digitisation.

Karl Popper, as long ago as 1945, wrote of the ‘abstract society’, in which “men practically never meet face-to-face; in which all business is conducted by individuals in isolation, who communicate by typed letters or by telegrams”. Although he regretted the isolation which this might bring, he did not see it as all negative. He saw it as releasing people from the ties of family and local community, and allowing formation of relationships beyond a local area. While the Internet has brought much of this to pass, it seems that he, like the rest of us, may have underestimated the strong desire to hold a physical document, or be in the same room as a physical person. Perhaps the need for the physical will not decline as quickly as enthusiasts for the digital world contend. If so, we will have to cope with these sorts of paradox for the foreseeable future. And archivists will still have to worry for their fragile treasures.

Wilson’s criticism, in essence, was that what passed for knowledge management was not, in fact, about managing knowledge; it was about managing information, or about organising work practices so that people can co-operate effectively. And indeed, these points have been reflected to a large extent in the way the subject is described now. It is often subsumed under ‘business intelligence’ or ‘communities of practice’, perhaps more realistic descriptions of its essence. And, insofar as it is still a area of concern to both researchers and practitioners in the information sciences, it is increasing being seen as a point on the spectrum of the management of information of all kinds, rather than as something separate.

In being assimilated in this way, knowledge management follows the pattern of other disciplines and activities on the overall information science/management spectrum. It takes something of an effort to recall that searching for digital information, now a common activity for most people in the developed world was, not so long ago, a specialised job. Making slides for a presentation, which again was a special skill and function, is now routinely done by school pupils. Creating metadata, once the province of the cat-and-class community, is now open to anyone who tags their photographs and books. Interestingly, while many jobs and skills in other sectors have simply disappeared, most information functions seem to continue. True, one would be hard-pressed to find a hot-metal typesetter outside a heritage setting, but most other information activities tend to continue, but without their special status. As with knowledge management, they simply cease to be fads.
These reflections should not, by the way, be taken as a criticism of Desouza and Paquette’s book. On the contrary, it is one of the better examples of its kind. Its structure is particularly logical and well thought out, with an introductory chapter introducing knowledge management leads to two expositions on ‘the concept of knowledge’ and ‘the concept of management’. It has more of a ‘library/information flavour’ than most other knowledge management texts. Several leading library/information writers in this area are mentioned, and a good philosophical historical perspective is provided. I felt obliged to comment the authors were trying a bit too hard in their identification of Sir Francis Bacon (1521-1626) as a ‘leading LIS figure’. One should not however be too critical of any author who goes out of their way to remind their readers that the elements of knowledge management did not begin with the digital computer.

The book can be recommended, alongside the volume edited by Kanti Srikantaiah and Michael Koenig, Knowledge management in practice: connections and context, to any student of library/information science or of information management. Indeed for any interested person with a library/information perspective, it would be a good introduction to a subject which retains its importance, though it may no longer be a fad.

I have to say I feel rather melancholic at the news. True, the exhibition had looked a bit lost for the past few years, with too few stands to fill the cavernous halls of Olympia. But those of us who were at the first Online Meeting in 1977 (yes, reader, I was indeed very, very young) will find it difficult not to equate early December/Online Information/West London. As the meeting moved up and down the road, from the Kensington Tara Hotel, to the old Town Hall, to the Novotel, and then to Olympia, it was a fixed point in the information year.

The 2011 Online exhibition, rather lost in the cavernous National Hall

The survival of IOLIM (as I still think of it) is therefore interesting. When it began, it was essential for everyone who was a serious user of computerised information to be there; that was where new products were launched and demonstrated, and you had to be there, to see things and to pick up the new shiny brochures. The web and social media changed all that; but there still seems to be the attraction of going along to meet people, as I discovered when it took me 30 minutes to leave the show this time, due to bumping into – literally – several people who I had not imagined would be there.

So, I imagine I’ll go to ExCel next year. I just wonder if early December/online information/East London is really going to work. And there is a ‘new concept’; and ‘international convention for the information community’. It sounds like something I will dislike, but one should not be cynical; I’m sure I can still bump into people.

Václav Havel, 1936-2011

This complaint will be familiar enough to anyone who lives in many major city of the developed world. But does it not also have an informational resonance? Have we not heard much the same said about the Internet, imposing a homogenising effect on the variety of printed publications and physical artefacts, and equally imposing a ubiquitous culture based on the English-language language? The Internet, admittedly, is changing, so that these charges may not be as valid as they were some years ago. But I think there is still much validity in this kind of criticism, applied to the information environment as much as to the physical.

Havel’s message is much broader than this, as he attacks a society “whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don’t know yet we’ll soon find out”. This also has an information resonance. If it isn’t to found on the first page of results from a simple Google search, it doesn’t exist; or if it does it isn’t worth searching for.

It seems to me that it is important that the information sciences address this. That they would consider ways in which new information environments can grow more organically from the old, rather than – as it sometimes seems – believing that nothing of the pre-Web world is worth remembering. And that they might keep in mind that, in information terms as much as in city planning, there are, as Havel puts it “some things that we shall never measure, and may never know”.

Yet on reflection, their success – with over three millions books of the series sold – is perhaps a little surprising, as they seem very out of tune with modern trends. Serious in their topics, they seem rather out of place alongside the garish novels and celebrity magazines which are the alternatives for a conveniently packaged read. Invariably written by well-known and authoritative authors, they could be intended as a rebuttal to the idea of the death of expertise. And without colour, still less any iota of multimedia, they seem like a survivor from a previous age in a web-based world. How can they compete with the Kindle and the iPad?

Is this I wonder, just an example of the last flowering of the book format, soon to be overtaken by newer technologies? It would, I suppose, be very nice to have the whole series on an e-reader. But maybe that would miss one point behind the success of this series; that it is nice to have in one’s hand a nicely produced physical book, which encapsulates a basic understanding of some topic. And that its physicality, and certainly its small size, encourages us to believe that we too can understand it, with a modest effort. Certainly a nicer feeling than that we get from the prospect of e-reader holding more books than we can read in a lifetime, or of an interminable list of search engine hits. Some may lament that these may be read instead a full-length “proper book”, particularly by students; well, even students have to start somewhere, and these texts are a different order of magnitude of quality than Wikipedia, which seems to be the default alternative.

An idiosyncratic hold-over from the great days of print, or a sign that not everything is going to be digital? Who knows? Perhaps in twenty years time we may have a Very Short Introduction to the Survival of the Little Book.

Finkelstein was born in Lvov in Poland (now Lviv in the Ukraine) in 1929, and seemed destined for a career in his family’s iron and steel business. Like so many from that part of the world, his life was disrupted by the 1939-45 conflict. After an initial banishment by the Soviets to Siberia, and then a period in the Middle East where his father was an officer in the Polish Army Corps, the young Finkelstein found himself a refugee in Britain in 1946. He worked in the nascent electronics industry, became a mining engineer, and then a lecturer in what was then the Northampton College of Advanced Technology in London. He was one of those who led the transformation of this college into City University, becoming its first Dean of the School of Engineering, and later Pro-Vice Chancellor.

I did not know Finkelstein well, although our time at the university overlapped by three years. I feel an obvious respect for one who helped establish the institution where I have worked for over twenty years. And, as someone who did not greatly enjoy my schooldays, I cannot but feel warmly towards Finkelstein, whose sole pre-degree formal education apparently amounted to six weeks of secondary schooling at the Trans-Siberian Railway School. But more fundamentally. I think his intellectual approach and legacy has a lot to say to the information sciences. He became best known as a measurement and control engineer, and head of a department of systems science, focusing on the idea that measuring instruments were, in effect, machines for processing information. This provides an interesting extension of information science principles into an area not always associated with them. But more fundamentally, he believed in what he wrote of as “the vision of the Colleges of Advanced Technology to bridge the gap between science and practice”; to show how academic research and theoretical study is always of the highest value to a professional discipline. This is a lesson which, it seems, the information sciences are always having to relearn.

A fuller biography of Finkelstein, with a link to a short autobiographical sketch, can be found on the City University site.

Bratislava's fairytale castle

Comenius University Library

The abstracts of the papers can be found here, and the full proceedings are published by Comenius University (ISBN 978-80-223-3087-9).