I presented a one-day training course earlier this week for Aslib, the London-based Association for Information Management. I present a few professional development courses for them, and this was a new one, run for the first time. Called Assessing our Worth, it looks at ways of measuring the impact and value of library / information services. The course was well-attended, the participants were nice, and it all seemed to go well.
perhaps paradoxically, it is the ‘well attended’ that worries me. More than twice as many people came for this topic, as for any other of my recent courses. True, it was a new course, and they usually do well. But even so … Are the information professions in so much of a ‘backs against the wall’ mode, that justifying ourselves becomes a main preoccupation, maybe even an objective in itself ? Or is this just a ‘credit crunch’ phenomenon ?
The Occasional Informationist 