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Paper based on a presentation by Hugh Mackay
It is the greatest of all cliches to say that Australian society is changing. It is a bit hard to talk about contemporary Australia without mentioning the changes, but it is possible to resist the widespread temptation to assume that change inevitably means degeneration.
Many of our demographic statistics point to radical change, and some of them (like the high and rising rate of youth suicide, or the record level of tranquillisers and antidepressants) are a bit hard to interpret in anything other than a negative way.
But every statistic tells a story and some of our most dramatic statistics tell quite complex stories. We are experiencing our lowest-ever birthrate and our lowest marriage rate for 100 years. Combined with our high divorce rate (40 per cent of contemporary marriages seem destined to end in divorce), that means the institutions of marriage and the family are undergoing significant change.
The women's movement has played a part (encouraging women to be more financially and emotionally independent), and so has the change in our divorce laws. Obviously, as young people experience a high rate of divorce among their parents, they become more wary of marriage. But there's a cultural shift involved here, as well: as a society, we are moving from a view of marriage as an institution to marriage as a relationship: older Australians entered the institution with a commitment to its stability; younger Australians evaluate their marriage on the basis of the quality of their relationship, which means that the entire concept of marriage becomes more subject to regular assessment and, in the process, more transient.
Attitudes to marriage and parenthood are also influenced by the tendency of the rising generation to postpone commitment: having grown up in a world of accelerating change, they've learned to keep their options open.
These factors - plus others associated with an ageing population - are driving the rise of single-person households: by 2006, the single-person household will be the most common household type in Australia.
Meanwhile, we have set a new record for the level of personal debt (largely driven by the influence of Baby Boomers who have not yet shaken the habits of the Sixties and who continue to embrace debt as the pathway to instant gratification).
Reviewing such trends, it's perhaps not so surprising that the level of consumption of antidepressants continues to rise: some social analysts whimsically suggest that if you're not on antidepressants, thatÕs because you're not fully aware of what's happening to you.
Underlying these statistics are a series of contradictions which characterise contemporary Australia. We are experiencing record levels of personal wealth at the top of the economic heap (fuelled by a boom in economic prosperity unprecedented since the 1950s) and yet we are experiencing a steady increase in the problems of poverty and homelessness. ACOSS estimates that about 2 million Australians could be classified as 'poor'; about 30 per cent of households have a combined annual household income of less than $20 000.
There are contradictions, too, in the way we are distributing work. While members of the full-time workforce are now working such long hours that their overtime alone absorbs about 500 000 extra full-time jobs, there are still roughly two million Australians who are either unemployed or seriously under-employed, and unemployment among young Australians has crept back up to 25 per cent.
Most of us are walking contradictions: we experience great optimism about Australia's future combined with persistent pessimism about the state of contemporary society. We are experiencing a surge of confidence, yet we continue to feel deeply insecure.
Four revolutions at once
There is no mystery about the insecurity: it is a long-term problem in Australia, arising from the fact that we have been living through four socio-cultural revolutions at once.
The gender revolution has radically redefined the role and status of women (and, gradually, caused men to reassess their own roles and responsibilities). In turn, that has reshaped the institutions of marriage and the family, the life of the neighbourhood, the nature of shopping, the landscape of politics and the dynamics of the workplace.
Simultaneously, the information revolution has been changing the way we live and work and, in the process, blurring the distinction between human communication and mere data transfer. As human encounters are rapidly being replaced by electronic transactions, our sense of connection with each other is being eroded. (There is some encouragement to be had, therefore, from recent American research suggesting that when people imagine they have fallen in love on the Internet, a face-to-face meeting usually dispels any such thought!)
Meanwhile, we are still in the throes of a cultural-identity revolution, in which we are coming to terms with new meanings of 'Australian', a new sense of our place in the region, a new, more confident acceptance of multiculturalism ... and, less happily, a challenge to our traditional embrace of egalitarianism implied by some of the other social, cultural and economic upheavals.
While all that has been happening, we have also been living through the economic revolution sometimes dubbed 'economic rationalism'. Terms like 'downsizingand 'human resources' capture the essence of how that revolution has been conveyed to the Australian community. Increasingly, people are inclined to believe that when a corporation experiences tension between the social conscience and the bottom line, the bottom line will win. The bleak folklore of the workforce now includes the proposition that 'if you've still got a job, that's because they haven't worked out how to get rid of you'.
A sense of disengagement
At the turn of the century, Australia is characterised by a renewed sense of caution, uncertainty and, above all, a sense of disengagement from the national agenda.
In essence, the problem is that Australians are feeling overloaded by a rather daunting national agenda containing items which seem utterly beyond their control: globalisation, foreign investment, population policy, immigration, youth unemployment, the republic, the GST, Aboriginal reconciliation ... all of this seems too hard, considering that it is coming on the heels of the four revolutions which have already so destabilised us.
It is as though Australians are entering a period of retreat; they are saying that the distant horizon is too forbidding, so they will deal with a more local, immediate, personal agenda. The mood has swung from a concern with national issues to a concern with tending our own patch. We have become more self-centred, less compassionate, more prejudiced and more concerned about things we can control: what video will we rent tonight? Will we put another room in the roof? Where will we go for the holidays? Which school will we send the kids to next year?
The implication of this period of disengagement is that, as people focus more on their own personal agendas, they do, indeed, begin to feel more cheerful and more optimistic. (It's no wonder that the media audience is drifting away from news and current affairs programs, in favour of 'lifestyle', voyeurism, comedy, romance, violence and all the other traditional escapist fare that takes our minds off 'the real world'.)
Are we at a turning point?
I see signs of three emerging responses to the events of the past few years, that will help to reshape Australian society during the early years of the 21st century.
First, a significant and growing number of Australians will be looking for ways to close 'the values gap': that is, the gap between the values we claim to espouse and the way we actually lead our lives. There is increasing talk about the need to 'restore balance'; to 'get my life under control'; to live 'the way I want to live'.
This quiet revolution will be led by women (who are increasingly reaching levels of authority and influence in business and the professions and, looking around them, are concluding that 'this is no way to live'). But men are getting the message, too.
The second discernible trend is less attractive: it is heard in the growing voice of those who are not saying 'I want to get my life under control', but 'I want to get your life under control'. This is the voice of regulation. These are the religious, social and cultural fundamentalists - the people who want to see tougher sentencing, more censorship, more laws to control everything that moves. Their answer to the instability and uncertainty of contemporary life is to say that if only we had more rules and regulations, we could restore our sense of security.
There is a double hazard in all this, of course. On the one hand, we might give away too many of our freedoms; on the other, we might stifle the very consciences such people would hope to quicken (since the more we regulate, the less we leave to the moral choices of individuals).
The third signpost comes from the rising generation of young Australians, who are showing us how to make sense of life in an uncertain world. Having never known anything but an accelerating rate of change and an unpredictable future, they have developed three strategies for coping:
Keep your options open as a way of incorporating a realistic uncertainty into your world-view;
The quest for a spiritual framework is leading them to explore post-material values;
They have become our most tribal generation, having realised that the most precious resource they have for coping with life in an uncertain world is each other.
The common thread running through much of this analysis is that we are on the threshold of a period of significant community development. The shrinking household means that we will have to satisfy our herd instinct in new ways: book clubs, eating out, adult education classes and community/group activities of every kind will satisfy the desire for connections with the herd which were previously satisfied by the life of the household.
This coincides with the increasing tribalism of young people, and a widespread desire to 'make the community work'.
All of this is very good news for libraries. Increasingly, the library can be the 'village green' where people meet not only to borrow or read books, but to discuss issues, to participate in 'book club'and similar events, to hear authors speak and to connect with the world of ideas. If communities thrive on conversation and contact, then libraries will be failing in their responsibility to their communities if they don't provide facilities for this contact to happen.
Of course, electronic networks are important but, in the emerging world of the 21st century, the paradox is that the more 'wired'and 'linked' we become, the more we crave compensatory human contact. The library can be the nexus between both forms of 'connectedness'.
Address to the ALIA 2002 Conference, May 2002 by Mr M A (Tim) Besley AC FTSE President, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
Everybody agrees that innovation, based on science and technology, is vital for the future of Australia.
We have the word of the nation's Chief Scientist, Dr Robin Batterham, on this. He titled his report to the Government 'The Chance for Change', and shortly before it was released we had the report of the Implementation Group set up after the 2000 Innovation Summit
We have the word of the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, who responded to the Chief Scientist's report with a policy entitled 'Backing Australia's Ability'. The Opposition, struggling to say that they agreed but felt they could do it better, called their policy 'Knowledge Nation'. Their brave attempt to show how this depended on everything being connected to everything else was, perhaps unfairly, lampooned as 'spaghetti and meatballs'.
One of the few constants at our Academy is the flow of reports and documents dealing with innovation. 'Words, words, words', as one up-and-coming young scholar once said. And yes, the reports are full of words and - here's the surprising thing - they are mostly the same words. The reason for this becomes clear once we dip into those reports. It is that innovation is one of those things (like the weather) that everybody talks about but nobody is doing anything about. Maybe people think it's beyond their capability to do anything about the weather, but such is their faith in science that they sort of hope someone else will tackle innovation, on their behalf.
At least that's the impression you could get from reading the reports. The reports are, it seems, accumulated examples of a great success and a great failing of Australian society: we are good at diagnosing our problems, but much less good at doing something about them. Lest you think I am unduly pessimistic, I should add that I think we are good at doing things about problems that are well-defined and conceptually simple. We build engineering structures that serve us well, and our major cities rank high up in the list of the world's most livable.
Salinity as an example
To take the most flagrant example of our failure to meet a challenge, I draw your attention to the problems of salinity that beset large areas of what should be productive agricultural land. This is an important example, because the salinity problem is as much social and political, as it is technical. We understand the cause of land salinisation quite well enough to suggest remedies, albeit ones that will only slowly restore the situation. One of the few things we have managed to agree upon is that it's going to take a long time to reverse the malpractices of a century and a half. The social and political aspects are also well understood, but action on those fronts is much more difficult. Everyone hopes for a technological fix, but few people believe that such a thing is possible. People created this problem, and people have to fix it. There is certainly money to be made from innovation in the field of getting large numbers of people to apply technology to large-scale problems.
We technologists are often accused of reductionism, but it is after all a very useful way to tackle large scale problems, and we shouldn't be ashamed to own up to tackling them one bit at a time. Provided, of course, that we realise they are all bits of the large problem and will all need to be tackled by someone. Under this rubric, then, I shall take one step from the general towards the specific, and say that we should be:
Even in this gloomy, salinised field, there are some innovations. One that stands out is Pyramid Salt. No, it's not an enterprise to deliver salt in tetrahedral shapes that can improve your state of being. Rather, it is a business that extracts saline ground water near Pyramid Hill in north western Victoria, and evaporates it to make Gourmet Salt. Clever marketing - an important commercial application of information technology - brings to the waiting public a product called Gourmet Salt, touted as an essential adjunct to the Gourmet Dinner Party. It comes in plain, eucalyptus or ti-tree flavour, and in those chunky bits that have to be ground in a small mill right there at the table. The co-product of this venture is a lowering of the water table in the district so that salt no longer reaches the surface. Some once-fertile fields are being restored to agriculture.
Applying the general rule
How do we turn specific instances like this into a general protocol for innovation? I am mindful of the advice of Australian philosopher, Max Charlesworth, that the problem with general rules is that there is no general rule to tell us how to apply the general rule to a specific case. Moving between the general and the specific, in either direction, then, seems to present problems.
Before I proceed to specifics, however, I will explore a little further the difficulties faced by anyone trying to derive a general theory of innovation. One good attempt was that of Thomas Hughes, in 1988, to model the development of large systems. His model included:
Hughes' work has been criticized on the grounds that while it fits the electric power industry quite well - no surprise, since that is where Hughes developed his model - other systems probably develop under unique and adventitious circumstances and so cannot be squeezed into the same box.
This is also the criticism directed at C M Christensen's 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen says that established companies can fail if they base their future business on what their present customers want. Using the examples of computer data-storage and earth-moving machinery, he shows how new approaches were taken by brash (often young) innovators to problems that established firms had regarded as 'solved'. The result was that customers deserted the existing technologies in droves and the new entrants found lots of new customers whose needs had been unforeseen by existing firms. Christensen was unable to demonstrate the generality of this 'innovators dilemma', so the conditions that spawn it remain as necessary but not sufficient conditions.
It might be that we are wasting our time looking for a magic formula for success, but let's examine a few of the terms in any formula that we might propose.
Some tall poppies
Scientific and technical achievements of a traditional kind are being joined by those of a less-tangible although none-the-less profitable nature. Consultants, of course, have always been rewarded for knowing something rather than doing something, but new ways of knowing are definitely being recognised. The recognition includes awards such as the Prime Minister's Science Prize, the Clunies Ross Awards, and the Victoria Prize.
In last year's Clunies Ross Awards, information technology was an integral part of the projects for which two of the six recipients were honoured for 'important contributions to science and its application for the economic, social or environmental benefit of Australia', to quote the terms of the Award. The two were Edwin van Leeuwen, of BHP Billiton, who adapted and improved submarine navigation technology to allow minute changes in gravitational forces to be detected by airborne instruments in the search for mineral deposits. The other was electronics engineer David Burton, not yet thirty-something, who invented a portable, computerised system for monitoring sleep, and turned his private venture into a listed company with a turnover of $16 million a year.
Another example, and one that I think has not attracted such an award, is the web site Looksmart, which was designed by a young Australian couple - Evan Thornley and Tracey Ellery. Among other things it provides a marvellous travel service, tiered by region, country, city, and so on down the hierarchy till you find a comfortable hotel. More dedicated sites such as those of the banking companies and the airlines now enable us to do much of our business on line. We can search library catalogues, including the national system Kinetica, and recover images as well as text. Our Academy website, typically for that of a learned academy, provides access to the reports we have published in recent years. We no longer print many hard copies. These reports are frequently accessed, and they cover subjects like air pollution in Australian cities, provision of water resources, the use of pesticides in Australia, and the environmental effects of population growth.
The era of do-it-yourself is well and truly here. To adopt a more scholarly tone, I should say that gatekeepers have given way to gateways. In the past, we needed help with telephones, airlines, libraries and archives, and banks - now we do it ourselves, and the small number of staff who remain in the gateways are usually too busy to stop for a chat.
Priorities
We all shy away from picking winners. Why? Maybe it's part of the traditional Australian disdain for tall poppies, except for those who travel fast or jump high. When it comes to research grants, it's our way of indicating to government that grant support needs to be more widely spread than just to obvious 'winners'. The range needing support includes good ideas, cross-disciplinary applications, and commercialisation - all parts of the innovation envelope. The reports on innovation that I alluded to earlier have grappled with the question of picking winners, but I don't think we can find clear answers in any of them as to how to do it, or even if we should be trying.
Since it is unlikely that our country - or any other, for that matter - could afford to fund all the research ideas coming forward, we do need some guidelines to help us decide who and what to fund. Sometimes it seems that those who are opposed to this form of punting would like to see everything funded, a position that is simply impracticable. The web site of the lobby group FASTS - the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies - includes the text of a presentation by American commentator Neil Lane, who claims that the success of the United States in science and technology is due precisely to its determination to fund the best, regardless of what might be conceived as national priorities. I doubt that it's as simple as this, but it clearly carries echoes of Vannevar Bush's post-war 'Endless Frontier' which led, among other things, to the formation of the US National Science Foundation.
A better concept that comes to my mind is a portfolio of proposals, each of which deserves support. When we die, according to the Greeks, our souls will be ferried across the Styx by that legendary boatman, Charon. Most of us get a preview when we are ferried across the stream that lies between work and retirement. For that crossing, the ferrying is done by an investment adviser. Now, I don't know what Charon said to his clients, but his successor invariably advises a diversified portfolio. Some investments will pay off, some won't. The skill lies in setting up the portfolio so as to maximise the former and minimise the latter, but we all know that every portfolio will turn out to contain a few duds.
The Cooperative Research Centres program nicely demonstrates the 'portfolio' concept. Some of the CRCs have been outstanding successes, others did not have their mandates approved for second five- or seven-year terms. The two lists should be a useful guide to the way information technology, but among those that failed to thrive are the former CRCs for Molecular Engineering and Technology, Advanced Computational Systems, Intelligent Decision Systems, and Southern Hemisphere Meteorology. Since all of these would have involved information management to considerable extents, I have to say - in the spirit of scientific honesty - that this little piece of research failed to confirm my hypothesis. Obviously, I need a research grant to enable me to pursue the matter further!
Seriously, though, the last few months have seen no fewer than six research priority lists published, some of which I shall discuss in a moment. For now, I simply note that our Academy has published a list, as have the Australian Academy of Science and the umbrella group, FASTS. The Chief Scientist Dr Robin Batterham (a Fellow of both Academies, incidentally) has a list, as does Dr Geoff Garrett, at the head of CSIRO. Ah, if only W S Gilbert were alive today, he'd have them on his list. The Australian Research Council completes this list of paid and unpaid advisers, who will be represented at meetings over the next few weeks with government officials who are charged with drawing up the research agenda.
A good general rule would be to select - not too narrowly - some good areas and to make sure that good people get to work in them. Some good outcomes can then be confidently expected.
The Australian Research Council
The Australian Research Council announced a few months ago that it intended to concentrate certain of its funds in just a few priority areas:
These are described by the ARC as 'fields of existing or emerging research strength in which Australia can achieve international leadership and which have the potential to deliver significant economic and social benefits to the community'. It is worth noting that information management is likely to play a big part in all of these areas.
When ARC announced these priorities, some commentators were shrill in their denunciation of the Minister. It's not that they didn't approve of prioritisation, they (and our Academy had done this, too) hadbeen urging the Government for some time to concentrate funding on the really important things. You will see, immediately, that just what these 'important things' were, depended a lot on who was speaking. 'The four nominated areas are good ones', our Academy said in a statement to the press, 'but their prioritisation should not be allowed to unbalance the ARC programs in other areas'. Having two bob each way? Well, maybe so, but we went on to draw attention to the importance of the social sciences, especially in applications of research, and in the 'nexus between technological and social sciences'. This statement reflects the fact that we are already working with the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia on some studies that need both kinds of specialist.
CSIRO
Recent experience at CSIRO provides another angle on the prioritisation debate. The new CEO announced that his first few months' experience in the new job had convinced him that there were too many 'silos' in the organisation. To redress this fragmentation, he announced, the organisation would henceforth concentrate on a small number of Big Hairy Audacious Goals - BHAGs - and that work towards them would involve staff from right across the organization. As an opening bid, he suggested that something like 70 per cent of the CSIRO effort and budget should be expended on the BHAGs.
The BHAG concept derives, I believe, from another of those management books you see on sale at airports, although this one comes with good recommendations from those in business. It is Collins and Porras' Built to Last. Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, first published in 1994 and subsequently reprinted - so it must be alright.
'A BHAG engages people' the authors say in one of those cute little must-read boxes for those who are too busy to read the text, 'it reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energising, highly focused. People "get it" right away; it takes little or no explanation'.
Now, it's one thing to build an organisation along these lines, but quite another thing to refashion an existing one. Just how retrainable were the scientists, we asked, and if they couldn't be retrained would there be a program of retrenchment followed by recruitment into new areas? Don't laugh - it had already happened on a small scale within CSIRO and Australia's universities have had - rather, are having - a stiff dose of it. The BHAG business seems to have settled down in CSIRO, with maybe only 35 per cent of the organisation's funds allocated to it, but even that proportion could produce dramatic change.
Collins and Porras had thought of that need for balance, too. 'Be careful to preserve the core while pursuing BHAGs' they said. It's very much a company model rather than one designed for a government research organization, but unlike most other books in the field it does draw on the experiences of many companies in fashioning its general rules of play.
Naturally, CSIRO scientists are working hard to show how their areas of skill and experience fit the new profiles. The rest of the CSIRO budget is expected to split 55:10 between 'national priority projects' and 'emerging science'. The current betting is that there will be BHAGs in the areas of:
Curiously, biotechnology and nanotechnology - the big buzz subjects in the markets and on the campuses - are not explicitly included, although as tools they may well underpin some of the chosen priorities.
Information underpins research
An area of very rapid development in Australia is the renewed search for therapeutic activity in extracts of Australia's flora and fauna. The search for plants that will cure everything from cancer to fluff-on-the-navel has long been a favourite pursuit of Australian chemists. The outcomes have made nobody rich, however, even though lots of good chemistry has been done. The features of the new search are, first, very high-throughput screening, and second, sophisticated data systems that enable researchers to keep track of everything. This second is now also a feature of many traditional drug-discovery laboratories, here and overseas, where therapeutic value can be predicted by exploring chemical interactions at the molecular level. The mapping of the human genome offers opportunities of this sort, too, and since the interactions and the 'therapeutic effect' will take place at the DNA or genome level, the search is directed towards prevention of disease, rather than cure in the traditional way. We have for many years had vaccines that provide protection, but the scope of this new attack at the molecular level is considerably broader.
Concluding remarks
A few years ago our Academy produced a report on the future of information technology in Australia. We sub-titled the report Sink or Swim, thus drawing on a well-established literary tradition in which a book or report has two titles. One is formal, usually just acknowledging its terms of reference or stating in a didactic way what it's all about. The other title is usually more romantic or pejorative, and just occasionally both, as I believe is the case with the title we chose for our report.
Pointing to 'the phenomenal growth in international trade in information products and services', the Academy observed that 'Australia simply cannot afford to be a spectator'. The report recommended actions that we believed would contribute to 'the prosperity and social cohesiveness of Australian society'. The report included some reflections on 'know-how and implicit knowledge', a matter that I referred to earlier. This may turn out to be, the report said, 'more important than the more traditional codified transfer of knowledge through publication'. Certainly the study group heard little directly from the young practitioners who were too busy turning their know-how into dollars. An outstanding example of such drive and innovation came to our attention recently when Gresham Partners appointed 21-year-old Alex Hartman as their Technical Director. Hartman sold his first company for a large sum of money when he was just 18 years old, and he was selling knowledge, not artifacts.
Our new determination to innovate, innovate, innovate - but hardly at all costs - suggest that we may have turned the corner even if we are still not too sure where our journey is taking us. ANU recently released a report suggesting that investment in research can be justified by the expected 50 to 60 per cent pay-off, and that the mid-twentieth century ideas of Vannevar Bush concerning the roots of national prosperity are still valid. The ANU report may turn out to be a case of joining the bandwagon rather than providing numbers that will convince Treasury ... we'll see. Still, this is hardly the time for complacency. We should welcome such support even if we have to take a lot of the numbers on faith. Research, even research-and-development, is not the whole story. Innovation calls for more than that, and some of what's needed can only come from financial markets and their risk-taking entrepreneurs. It's far from being a simple business, and in searching for general rules we need to keep in mind the words of my favourite philosopher, H L Mencken, who said (something like) 'to every complex problem, there is always a simple solution, and it is always wrong'.
There are a number of signs that the Australian Government is taking this matter seriously. The Prime Minister, a few months ago, announced a new policy entitled Framework for the Future, under which information and technology would be targeted for special attention. Part of this would come from a Broadband Advisory group chaired by the Communications Minister, Senator Alston.
Brendan Nelson, Minister for Education, Science and Training, in a speech at the National Press Club a few weeks ago, described IT as 'the railway lines of the 21st century'. He was alluding, no doubt, to the advances in technology and communication that the railroad era introduced, and to the profound impact that railways have had on the our cities and the way we live in them. It will be interesting to see where Driver Nelson - or should that be Controller Nelson? - takes us in the next year or two.
Address given at the 2002 Annual General Meeting of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Sydney 20 May 2002, by Dr Alan Bundy, ALIA president
In E M Forster's 1910 novel Howard's end Margaret is trying to help the obdurate Wilcox explore the road of his soul. To her:
It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon... Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to each other, will die.
'Only connect...' is the theme of this address. It is about the need for greater connection within our profession. It is about greater connection with those who have the capacity to help us to progress a better Australia through its information enabling during this century. It is about greater connection with our values, because values are at the heart of the human condition, life presents us with myriad choices, and we make our choices based on the values we hold.
Ethical leadership
An important role, within the ever-increasing panoply of roles of any modern professional association, remains to exercise ethical leadership for its profession. In fulfilling that role the ALIA Board of Directors endorsed in March 2002 a Core Values Statement - the first to be adopted by any library and information association worldwide - the preface to which asserts that:
A thriving culture, economy and democracy requires the free flow of information and ideas.
Fundamental to that free flow of information and ideas are Australia's library and information services. They are a legacy to each generation, conveying the knowledge of the past and the promise of the future.
Library and information services professionals therefore commit themselves to the following core values of their profession.
Those seven values are:
That first value derives, of course, from ALIA's unique first object 'the promotion of the free flow of information and ideas' - unique among the professions in Australia, and unusual in its expression among library and information associations worldwide.
Partnerships
It is the last value - about partnerships - which is, however, the concern of this address. That value states 'we advocate cooperation between all library and information services, and with related agencies, for the private and public good'. At the local, national and international levels - despite occasional contretemps - there is no profession which already partners and cooperates more. We need, however, to now go beyond cooperation, to a position where every sector in the profession sees itself as a stakeholder in the others, rather than as a dispassionate or even critical observer.
For it is manifest that within our profession, as in Australian society at large, there is a disconnect.
During my presidential term I have participated in all of the ALIA special interest conferences, and many others. Those conferences have emphasised four things:
By measures such as access, overall cooperation, innovation, application of technology, electronic provision, pay justice, information literacy and the library as educational change-agent, Australia's library infrastructure ranks among the top ten nations worldwide - as does that of our colleagues in New Zealand with whom we need to strengthen a connection diminished in recent years. In this Library and Information Week there is indeed much to celebrate - a positive story to tell.
The needs
Yet, if we start at the beginning, there are still too many Australian children who cannot be assisted in their critical preschool literacy development by their local public library because that library does not have a children's librarian - and if that library had the funds for one, it would have difficulty in finding anything like a qualified children's librarian because Australia's library and information studies programs do not provide well for them. That should be the local, state and national concern of all of us - university, TAFE, teacher, public, special librarians, information specialists, consultants, information brokers, educators and vendors.
There are still too many government schools in particular - those schools responsible for the education of 70 per cent of young Australians - which employ none or inadequate numbers of teacher librarians and do not support their libraries well, so children and teachers are disadvantaged, or the load is shed to public and other libraries. And if a TAFE or university library is inadequate students will resort to the public library - of which students of all types are typically 35 per cent of users - or to special and other libraries.
And if a school and a public library are inadequate and do not cooperate in developing young Australians who are literate, information literate and relate productively to libraries and library professionals in their formative years, TAFE and university libraries will inevitably lament the information illiteracy of their new students, blame their schools and their teacher librarians - and typically leave it at that. And if those young Australians move on as adults to decision-making positions in the corporate or government sectors they will arrive there with a baggage of poor library and information experience which may prejudice them against an appreciation of the value of timely, accurate and mediated information, and against those agencies and professionals best able to supply it.
The message is a simple one. To use an analogy, as each goose flaps its wings it creates an uplift for the birds that follow. By flying in a V formation, the whole flock adds 71 per cent greater flying range than if the birds flew alone. In other words, those who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.
That sense of common direction tends, however, to be mired in our myopic professional silos, where it is easier and less challenging to ignore or even criticise those in other silos than it is to make the conscious and sustained effort to understand them, relate to them, and work together with them.
As an indication of that disconnect 63 per cent of teacher librarians regard their knowledge of public library issues and developments as low or very low, and 71 per cent of public librarians regard their knowledge of school library issues as low or very low.* Similar percentages would be likely found for special librarians, law librarians, health librarians, university librarians, TAFE librarians and information specialists in their real knowledge of each other and of school and public libraries.
What Australia needs
That lesson was not lost on those in our profession and in the laity who saw last century the need for maximum connection in improving Australia's library and information services. Because of them, there is now a substantial base of achievement on which we can move forward with confidence and assertion, to help Australia itself address the many issues about which it needs to connect if it is to prosper during this century - issues such as economic development, international competitiveness, education, environmental sustainability, health, Aboriginal reconciliation, multiculturalism, social inclusion and sustenance of an open democracy. They are issues which can only be addressed well by the free flow of information and ideas and systematic attention, not just to the digital divide, but rather to the information literacy divide - because all of the free flow of information in the world is valueless to those who do not recognise their need for information and have the capacity to identify, access, evaluate and apply the needed information.
The challenge
Those issues will be best addressed by a nation which recognises that information technology alone is no panacea - that there is no intertopia. A comprehensive human and specialist response is needed which we are indeed well placed to provide, because we do so already, and we do so with broader community appreciation and support than we sometimes recognise or certainly capitalise on. The challenge before us is to foster a greater awareness within all sections of the community of what we already contribute, the high level of return on what is currently a very modest investment, and of the importance of increasing that investment. Consider, for example, that the whole of the public library system in Australia, used by nearly 13 million people, costs less than just one large Australian university with 35,000 students.
Our light on the hill
To paraphrase Ben Chifley, we have a great objective - our light on the hill - which we aim to reach by enabling the free flow of information and ideas in the interest of all Australians. We do this not only in our libraries but anywhere we may help. If it were not for that great objective, our libraries, our profession, our associations, would not be worth the endeavour.
Our libraries, our profession, our associations, are surely worthy of such endeavour. However, if we only connect more in that endeavour, we will just as surely move that much closer to our light on the hill, and to a thriving Australian culture, economy and democracy enabled by the free flow of information and ideas.
* Bundy, A (2000) Essential connections: school and public libraries for lifelong learning http://www.library.unisa.edu.au/papers/essential.htm