British Librarianship and Information Work 1991‐2000

Citation

Bowman, J.H. (2007), "British Librarianship and Information Work 1991‐2000", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 9, pp. 830-830. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710831301

It is a common late night conference bar complaint that recent history has been neglected; that the endless changes and the stirring times we have survived have yet to be recorded; that the true story will fade if not recorded soon. And then two come along at once … .

At first sight it is perhaps a little curious to find a report of professional activity in the 1990s appearing in the second‐half of the next decade. However, one common theme of almost all the essays in this volume is that it was a period of dramatic change. As such it clearly deserves to be put on record, not least because the memories are fading. As Mary Nixon puts it in her essay on learned, professional and independent libraries, paraphrasing the old Timothy Leary (or was it Robin Williams?) quote “the 90's might well be the new 1960s – those who were there at the time seemed to remember remarkably little about them”.

The volume itself comes in a long line. The first volume of The Year's Work in Librarianship appeared in 1929, covering the previous year. This rolled forward with a few gaps until the 1950s when it moved to the quinquennial pattern familiar to most of us, with the last volume covering 1986‐1990 appearing in 1993. After a gap and a change of publisher from CILIP, Ashgate have decided to produce a catch‐up ten year volume. There is no indication of whether this will be a new pattern or whether it will either cease, or revert to a quinquennial format.

So is it worth it? The answer is an emphatic yes. Quite apart from our professional love of order and continuity, the 1990s were a period of dramatic change and this is a solid attempt to record that. There are 31 chapters covering most aspects of librarianship, beginning with types of library from national to news, then focussing on cross‐cutting aspects such as “research”, “co‐operation” and “the book‐trade”. There are gaps of course. As the editor sadly notes, various contributors failed to deliver, so that there are no chapters on children's services, industrial libraries, medical libraries or multimedia. This is unfortunate, since one of the strengths of the series has been that continuity of topic. The chapters range from literature reviews to histories coloured by personal knowledge, to passionate outbursts over deeply felt issues such as Vincent and Pateman's statement that “Probably the most significant event of the decade… was the murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993”. There are clear differences of style and approach, but it is clear that a lot of good editing has been undertaken and this is worthy of remark.

The essays themselves are almost uniformly good and will form reliable sources of evidence and information for future reference. And there is precious little difference in quality between those who survived the 1990s and those who are rather younger. The essays are characterized much more than one might have expected by political as much as technical or professional developments. The sharp divide between the Thatcher and Conservative government years and the early love affair with a pre‐Iraq Labour government colours a surprisingly large number of the contributions. This sort of compilation also allows two neatly opposite effects.

On the one hand it is fascinating to see how other parts of the profession, of which one is ignorant, fared. The whirlwind of change which hit newspaper libraries, for example, is described in a model essay by Richard Nelsson. On the other hand one can read about the areas one knows and have old memories (and arguments) refreshed, or mutter bitterly about what has been missed. For example, the chapter on the impact of the internet is quite thin on the important first‐half of the 1990s, while the chapter on research focuses on the library schools and the RAE is less sure on practitioner research and national strategy for research. But these are perhaps quibbles in a generally excellent volume.

There are however two more substantial defects, which may lie in the nature of the activity. These are the absence of grand overarching themes and the absence of individuals. The 1990s were a seminal period for the profession and the decade in which we moved from being a service of necessity which any decent professional from architect to zoologist and any member of the public from school‐child learning to read to pensioner enjoying literature would use, to being an optional extra. In 1990, where electronic access to information was provided, it was for mediated searches. The rise and fall of the CD‐Rom happened in this decade and is alluded to but not really covered. And yet it, and the early work on the internet (briefly covered by Bradley), were perfectly aligned at the tipping point when the attempt either to mediate searching, or at least insist that users were trained fell apart in the face of easy‐to‐use and cheap technology. The overwhelming rush of technology will no doubt feature in the next volume, but it was the development of services such as BIDS which moved power irrevocably from the librarian to the user.

The other obviously missing theme is globalization. The 1990s were a decade in which the UK played a huge part internationally both in international bodies such as IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) and IATUL (International Association of Technological University Libraries), and in the Framework programmes where we played a strong role in Europe, by definition in joint R&D ventures with partners in other countries and began to open up international partnerships from America to Australia – as well as dealing with the vagaries of increasingly multi‐national companies. No doubt others could and would select different themes, such as the attempts to develop a national information plan, but there should be a place for some overarching general chapter which examines the trends. Although some of these points are mentioned in individual chapters, they are not brought together.

The second absence is the role of individuals. There is a pervasive sense of events shaping people and problems and no sense of the role of individuals in seizing opportunities or of the conflicts of opinion and personality which shape all events. The volume is full of reports from non‐librarians and the names from Evans to Follett are writ large. There are exceptions: David Nicholas ably focuses on individual researchers, while Robert Parry on map libraries has a touching tribute to Helen Wallis.

But, apart from relations with government, we are seen as shaped by the tides and events of history. There is no sight of the bitter battles between Higher Education and the British Library; of the politics of setting up the Library and Information Commission before folding it into the much disliked Resource; of the battles with publishers over licensing of the way in which individuals shaped events rather than simply responding to them. It may have been a style choice, this is not clear, but a history of the 1990s which does not have in its index, far less its text, names such as Batt, Brindley, Collier, Dempsey, Heaney, Hendrix, Mowat, Perry, Rusbridge and Shimmon, to mention but a few, finishes up concealing as much as it reveals about how history is made. The result is a useful, well produced, authoritative but not definitive work.

A quite different approach is taken by Carr in what is in some senses an apologia pro vita sua. Carr was (and is) one of those individuals who shaped events – and a friend of the reviewer, which inevitably colours judgements. He had a distinguished professional career, latterly at Oxford but was also heavily involved in those national committees and structures which shaped Higher Education and its libraries throughout the 1990s. Carr is witty, knowledgeable and widely‐ read, with a citation list from the 16th century theologian Richard Hooker to the Spice Girls. With a sure and light touch and some very readable writing and a self‐deprecating touch, he attempts to capture what it felt like to undergo that period of dramatic change throughout the 1990s and up to his retirement in 2005.

The book is a slightly odd but cleverly linked mixture of high strategy, history of the eLib programme, and reflections on topics as varied as e‐science and the history and future of the book, with case studies of his own experience at Oxford in both fund‐raising and modernizing Oxford's libraries. If it too suffers from an apparent absence of the conflicts which often make things happen, it is much sharper on the role of individuals in shaping events. This makes it much more upbeat in its approach. In fairness too, the single focus of the book allows him an expansiveness inevitably denied to the authors of 7,500‐word chapters. This is a thoroughly charming book and falls into that limited class of the enjoyable read. If this reviewer's recollections of events are at times at variance with those of Carr, this perhaps reflect Nixon's quotation with which this review began and the importance of both these works in beginning to record a hugely turbulent period.