email really isn't the medium for this, and your patience will be distracted beyond human limit, so jump :)

    phind phIL 1

In this note, I have taken a paragraph heading as Phil marked it and put in italics, giving it a number.  Then I have taken clips of Phil’s comments and given them sub numbers putting a string in bold.  Most of this will probably be missing in jiscmail.

I have started at the end.

1.	>>Perhaps we need to reform the library association?<<?


1,1   Perhaps we should do away with the internet.

Well, we don’t have the power. And, in any case, the internet is only a transport layer protocol.  That would be like doing away with the Post Office.  Except that it also points to my point.  When one uses the internet as a short hand expression, there isn’t a shared understanding of what is being included.  Does the internet include the library catalogue?  Does it include JSTOR? And so on.

It seems clear to me that in terms of communication, a change in time and space, the technology has made a real difference.

Too, I am in favour of digitizing almost e-very-thing.  Digitised files organized enable.


1.2	 go back to chaining books to the walls!

Well, chaining books to walls was only for security.  There was still access.  And in some circumstances the chained book remains right.

But so too does a need for security.  The difference now is the digitized object may exclude access and not simply for one right but for two, for now the intellectual property right.

1.3	, go back to using card? catalogues

Fortunately some libraries maintain them, the Manchester Reference Library for example, and it is marvelous.

What is now considered an opac was designed only as a circulation control device.  As a catalogue all you have is grep.

Brown, Kent, Pope, Gay are not good grep.    Burlington is an house, a magazine and a lord.  These are not good grep.  Handel is hendel, haendel.  These are not good grep.

In a card catalogue there was an author catalogue, a subject catalogue and that might be dictionary and or classified, and this at the very least, in a school library even.

You learn how to use the catalogue and the shelf mark notation.  As Warburg commented, the information is in the neighbourhood. As Blunt remarked in 1938, you wont find anything in a large national collection such as the British Museum if you don’t know precisely what you are looking for.  And small specialist collections means you have a metaknowledge need.  But now we have grep.


1.4	information by the scruff of the?neck, manipulate it and provide it to our user

Now we are at the heart of the matter.

This is politics, history and philosophy, which is what the ph in find means, for information is a verb, information is a process, and it is the interaction of the user with the constructions which is where the information is created.  Information is an act of creation.

It is not provided.

But the problem is we have no agreement.

There are at least nine different meanings of the word information, and know one knows.  When in 1386, the earliest recorded use, its meaning is clear to me; in the English Book of Common Prayer, its use is clear, if deeply unpleasant and to be smashed, which it has been.  In the Ministry of Information, in which Elizabeth David, it is sort of clear and now drifting away, which led George Orwell to 1984.

If we then have information professionals, information practitioners, and all the rest of the apparatus we need to ask what is being done to whom, why and how.

1.5	the line s?that we started back in the 60s

I’m not sure I know what this includes and excludes?  There is a KPMG line about making money?  The British Library has been free at the point of access, and now, yet again, I find myself fighting to defend that.  The libraries open and free that was begat out of libraries for social change was about extending access, free at the point of need, through general taxation.  This was taken to the formation of higher education access to the internet (which is why what is meant by the internet is of significance).  This is the matter of international public goods, and international public rights, and is a contested category with private rights, private goods, regulated markets and free markets.  So I am not at all sure what these lines are.

1.6	make our ?role even more important

This isn’t in my stack the point of the exercise at all.

Veblen in the theory of the leisure class makes a last chapter on higher education.  Veblen is a better grep than Burlington.  This list is mainly a list of higher education.  His arguments about the leisure class at stake points to professionals.  And to the new information and communication technologies.

This is not what we are for.

And this points back to the issue of the catalogue, 1.3, for there are ontological issues (my meaning of ontological, not Wendy Hall’s) at stake.  The information, (1.4) is in the objectivity, the subjectivity, the intersubjectivity, and this means avoiding the post modernist rhetoric, or social tagging.  In some domains it doesn’t matter, in some it does.  In some domains values count.

The difference is knowing the difference.

2.  but the profession is remarkably? silent, like it has given up, yet the ILI is badged with CILIP

2.1	How?someone can say that the profession is 'remarkably silent' is quite simply?beyond me.


The profession here has three aspects, and three prospects.  It might well be the case, within some elements of the profession, that there is an enthusiasm, and even an hunger.  To that we will return.  But if a meeting of SLAIG I went to recently is anything to go by, within these meetings there is not a discussion of how and what we profess.  We may profess management by objectives, or cost benefit analysis.  But that is not the profession of the management of a library.  This is where, 1.4 comes in again.  And where politics, history and philosophy, ph, comes in again, as well as 1.3.

But the profession also means what it says.  What is taught, by who, to whom, who practices what?  What is the core, the centre which must hold, to misquite Yeats.  It is classification and cataloguing, the naming and ordering of things.  This is the only thing that only we do.  Biologists or botanists or geologists do it but only we make it the practice.  And this is the ontology, in 1.6.

We might have social tagging, we might have IR (in the capitals, upper case sense), we might have the semantic web, but it is the ontology which counts, then the epistemology, then the logic, then the aesthetics, and then the ethics.

The third case in which the profession is silent, is with the other professions.  That is why I started with the inaugural lecture and the remark of the chief scientist on find.

For years I have been trying to get the BCS and CILIP together to agree a shared work programme, along the lines outlined in the WSIS, and prior to that, more times that I can remember, but when it comes to the places where things should be said, there is silence.  That is why I organized the meeting on information literacy I called infocy, why the meeting on metadata, the creating sparks festival and coming up, KIDMM.

N.  And by now I fear this is much too long for an email, this is the wrong medium/  It is much too long for all the 20= and other stuff with which jiscmail will clutter.  We could under 1.1 have pointed to the politics of the formation of mailbase for that is part of the internet perhaps, and I will probably add some more sub paragraphs, more evidence, more data to the argument made so far, for it seems to me matter materia, while I endlessly battle with this text editor which changes without my permission for it knows not what I intend.

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