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Archbishop Peter Carnley, AO Archbishop of Perth and Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia
First, I must thank you for the invitation to address this Conference. It is a great privilege, though I have to tell you that I was originally a little reticent about accepting it. This was purely because of self-doubt: I asked myself what on earth I knew about librarians and those who manage information, and their profession, and whether I might have any qualification at all to be standing here.
Upon a little reflection, however, it occurred to me that in fact I at least have experience on my side. I have spent a good deal of my life in libraries. Apart from the regular but more occasional use of libraries during my teenage years (both the school library and the local town municipal library), I did a four year Arts Degree at the University of Melbourne, two years in a theological College and then three years as a research student in Britain. That makes nine years of my life as a full-time post-secondary student, nearly 17 per cent of my living years, in which I was in a library almost on a daily basis. So, I have come to appreciate over recent days that a good deal of my own formation as a literate human being has occurred in libraries. If experience counts for anything, that is at least something.
Today I spend less time in libraries, but I do have some continuing acquaintance with one library in particular and this gives rise to some anecdotal perceptions which speak of its importance in the community. It so happens that a few years ago the Perth City Library had to vacate its premises in Council House in Perth so as to allow for an asbestos problem to be dealt with; during the Council House refurbishment the library was moved into a Church owned city property next to the Cathedral where I have my own offices.
This is just across the street from Council House where it had been located. Though this move was originally designed as a temporary measure, as it has turned out, the library has never moved back to Council House. This is not because of lack of energy to tackle the removal process; it is because enrolled membership and the actual use of the library skyrocketed immediately it moved; just by moving it across the street people had increased access to it, and it had a little more public visibility.
This has meant that I myself pass it every morning and afternoon. As I go up from and down to the car park underneath, the lift doors regularly open on to the library; people in the lift go to and come from it. I thus have some anecdotal experience of its increased use, and I daily brush shoulders with the current clientele - predominantly I think elderly people, retired people and pensioners coming and going with their weekly reading material, and a good proportion of young people, very noticeably mainly of South East Asian origin who I suspect may be studying or attending English language courses in Perth. There are also occasionally some people apparently from the Middle East, perhaps newly arrived immigrants and refugees. This anecdotal experience which is without statistical analysis gives me the impression of the importance of the City Library to some specific groups in the community who might generally be thought to be disadvantaged, and so connects with the theme of this session of this Conference which aims to focus on the community and its future information needs.
Despite this fairly varied experience of libraries, I must confess, I have not thought much about the library and information professional's work. An occasional gratified thought has certainly passed through my head when books have been found on the self in their correct place; indeed, I have been regularly prompted by this kind of experience to marvel at the care and skill of meticulous librarians who make sure that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds. But apart from this, the behind-the-scenes work of librarianship and managing information has been by and large taken for granted. I suspect that is how it is for most people in the community. It is therefore a welcome opportunity to have been prompted by the invitation to address this conference to take some long overdue corrective action on my own part. If we can help to prompt the wider community to a little reflection then all the better.
I want to reflect with you on values as they impact upon this profession, both the value to the community of librarians and their libraries themselves and the values by which information professionals work which I think must be community values. But first let us find a way in to the subject by picking up the over all theme of this conference - powering our future and the information agenda.
In my experience of libraries in the period in which I used them most intensively catalogues were, of course, comprised of drawers full of cards, and we relied on the Dewey decimal system, though the Cambridge University Library catalogue consisted of a whole room full of huge leather-bound books which had to be lifted on to sloping benches in order to be consulted. Librarians could be observed pasting catalogue slips Into these books. This library also used an idiosyncratic cataloguing system, neither Dewey nor Library of Congress. I never did work out the logic of it, or how the librarians managed somehow to remove and shuffle those pasted-in slips so as to insert new ones between authors. It is hard to believe that that was the antiquated way it was done just a generation ago.
The change the computer has made has, of course, been enormous and we would not want it otherwise. Even at the point of cataloging it has transformed our lives. And this is not to mention the apparently limitless volume of electronically available information that can be accessed from almost anywhere, in addition to that available in books on library shelves.
I take it as read, however, that nobody anticipates that computers will replace books. The packaging of extended lineal texts between covers that can be held in the hand and taken to bed or to the beach or out into the garden, means that books are unlikely to be superseded by computer screens. One can sit up in bed with a book, but it is hard to envisage scrolling through a long text on a computer screen in bed. A book can end up mixed up with the blankets or it may slide gently and undamaged to the floor if you fall asleep; the obvious disaster of having the computer hardware crash to the ground does not bare thinking about. In a utilitarian sense a book appears to have it over a computer in terms of sheer comfort and ease of handling. This means that I assume that the publication of books will be of continuing importance.
In the foreseeable future it seems we are headed towards a world of varied means of access to information, with printed material and computers somehow operating in tandem, along with hard copies of selected articles downloaded, which provides a kind of bridge between the published book and what can be read on the computer screen.
However, this seems to raise for me a problem that should be of concern for the whole community about preservation and long-term access to information. We know that the deletion of E-mails will mean that the historians of the future will be denied their former reliance on personal letters and correspondence. That will be unfortunate enough, particularly for writers of biographies. But there is another problem of which I have already had some experience: last year I myself put an otherwise unpublished theological paper on a diocesan web site as part of a national and fairly in-house discussion we were involved in across Australia at the time. However, a British research student accessed it on the internet and quoted it in his PhD thesis. By the time this student came to check his references the article had been removed from the web, in the belief that it had been there long enough and had served its purpose. (I have found that some masters of web cites of a journalistic bent like to keep up the strikes by ensuring constant turn over and variety of offerings). But, not only could this student not check his own references (which as it turned out he had a little wrong); anybody reading his thesis and wanting to follow up the reference is denied that possibility. Moreover, this thesis will eventually be published as a book.
I guess the responsible thing for me to do is to put the article back on the web site. But the point I wish to make is that www references in books may very frustratingly direct readers to information that is no longer existent. Given the uncontrollable mobility and potential elusiveness of electronic information, it seems to me that challenges are bound to multiply particularly for those who were in the past meticulous in maintaining the library as a repository of material pertaining to particular subjects. I am not convinced that the mix of hard copy published work and the electronic availability of information has yet been satisfactorily worked out. In this circumstance the question is: Will the library be able to sustain its identity as the place in the community where we go to find out things? Or will we see the proliferation of specialist subject libraries where librarians can make a point of downloading articles and bits and pieces and filing them away in boxes as a foil to their possible electronic disappearance? Not a few of my acquaintances have very helpful librarian friends who regularly pop a downloaded article that they have come across and that they think may be of particular interest into the post for them. My suspicion is that this kind of service could well multiply, though I dare not raise the question of who pays for the postage.
On the other hand, there is another sense in which information is no longer very manageably and controllably but passively chained up in tomes on dusty library shelves; if anything it is urged upon us. In the modern world we are bombarded with information. Out in the community we are subject therefore to a kind of politics of information, as web masters and even individual authors vie to advertise their web sites so as to exercise a kind of political influence by drawing attention to their own agenda and by urging and promoting their own points of view. By putting up an article or a comment on a web page and then counting the hits, and even analyzing the number of off shore hits compared with those from within Australia, we have a kind of barometer for measuring the degree of political influence we imagine we have achieved. During the last General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia in Brisbane last year the national Anglican Church web site received nearly 200 000 visits in little more than a week. This made us all well pleased with ourselves, but whether it led to enlightenment, let alone to some kind of socially or culturally productive outcome, is of course not known. A hit or a visit in search of information may be ephemeral, trivial. This brings me to an important point I wish to make.
There is a world of difference between information and the availability of information, and even the development of skills of computer literacy and navigational skills, on one hand, and the acquisition of productive knowledge on the other. If anything the information agenda and the ease of access to information lulls us into a passive sense that nformation is somehow 'out there' for us to access, and that it is a desirable thing to take advantage of it and simply 'become informed'. Just how useful to us much of the information that is so readily available to us at our finger tips actually is, is another matter. This, of course, applies particularly to information to which we have access via the internet, but it also applies to information to which we have access on the shelves of a library. Information and the availability of it is one thing, useful and productive knowledge is quite another.
We are all aware that much of the information to which we can so very easily gain access on the internet is in fact tawdry, and we know that a great deal of it is even anti-human and pornographic. I am sure you have all come to your knowledge of that at second hand! But leaving that aside, much of it is simply trivial and in a sense useless. I understand that there is one web site that in fact specializes in trivial information: Did you know, for example, that on it you can learn that there are 23 muscles in the ear of a cat? If I were to offer a prize of $100 tomorrow for any librarian who can find out what name the letter 'S' stands for in 'Harry S Truman' I guess there would be some eager enough to spend some time searching it out overnight. But I would not advise you to spend too much time in this trivial pursuit, as those of you who play the game will know, because that particular 'S' stands for no name. It is just 'S.' President Truman's parents called him 'Harry S.' This piece of information is true ... but trivial.
All the information to which we today have such easy access can amount to a deluge that can be overwhelming. Very seriously it can lead us to an atomistic approach to information, which as it stands is not purposeful and not really useful. An undirected obsessive quest just for information could lead to a life of trivial pursuits that are ultimately entirely time wasting, and not a stimulus to creative thought so much as to a thought inhibiting mental stagnation caused by information overload. D. Shenk in a book called The Data Smog: Surviving the Info. Glut (Harper Edge, San Francisco, 1997) makes the point in this way:
'At a certain level the glut becomes a cloud of data smog, that no longer adds to the quality of our life but instead begins to cultivate stress, confusion, and even ignorance.' Clearly, the availability of information and really useful and productive knowledge are two different things. So we will not get far in thinking about the information agenda and the future needs of the community, unless we spend a little time thinking about the nature of creative thinking and productive and useful knowledge.
In a Business/Higher Education Round Table position paper (No.5) entitled What Is Needed To Make Australia a Knowledge-Driven and Learning-Driven Society? Professor Ian Reid, until recently the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) at Curtin University, wrote:
'If a society is to become truly learning-driven, it will need to understand that powerful knowledge, while drawing constantly on information and issuing in the exercise of practical skills, also relies on creative thinking. This means more than generating new thoughts; it means testing and applying them as well, and doing so through collaborative effort. Bright ideas may often occur to individuals, but innovative processes depend on the capacity of a community of learning to put ideas to work and rigorously evaluate them.' (p.6)
So the point I want to make is that access to information can be the illusion of knowledge. To be turned into purposeful and life-enhancing knowledge, information must be selectively used. Then, to turn true knowledge into wisdom it needs to be even more carefully processed and reflected upon. We must not be hoodwinked by talk of the information age into thinking that the having of information, or worse just the bare possibility of unhindered and easy electronic access to information, is a substitute for the acquiring of productively useful knowledge, let alone the 'getting of wisdom'.
But, I ask myself, how a repository of books, and facilities to aid the search for information electronically, may be turned into a node in the community for the transmission of culture and the stimulation of literacy, learning, and the acquisition and sharing of productive knowledge?
First, it seems to me that the whole community relies heavily on the information professional to do some initial selective work and, in a sense, to help us all to discriminate. Simply by making a judgement about what is worth stocking and what is not, and then about what can fairly safely be passed over given budgetary restraints, in favour of something of better quality, involves a kind of selectivity. Implicit in this will be a value judgment. In the future, given the volume of available information, I think the community at large is bound to rely more and more on the information professional to be discriminating. I know of one school librarian in one of our Perth schools who reads children's books most nights of most weeks, always in search of books that she thinks children will both enjoy and benefit from. You must know better than I do what criteria of judgment you use when stocking and purchasing. This is necessarily value laden work which carries enormous burdens of responsibility. It is an area where the community at large is hugely dependent upon the information professional.
Then there is the skill of discerning and judging what kind and what level of material will be most helpful to a particular client, and how often do we see a diligent librarian showing someone how and where she might find something suitable to her needs? All this means that the community is dependent on the librarian as a professional expert, but also as a kind of teacher, a mentor to people who are making the transition from finding information to acquiring knowledge. Given the volume of information available, in this way the librarian is increasingly going to be an encourager of knowledge and learning. I think this role in the context of the community is almost certainly underestimated, hugely underestimated.
For example, there has been a person on the staff of schools called the teacher-librarian, but from what I hear around the traps I suspect that this is a role that may be in danger of disappearing by default. Economic rationalism, or as I prefer to call it, economic fundamentalism, coupled with the illusion that we can all do it ourselves, D.I.Y, in the sense that we can gain access to information all by ourselves on the computer, means that the necessity of an information management expert may be thought to be no longer a priority. Instead, it is thinkable that the voluntary assistance of a willing parent may replace the professional teacher librarian to keep library stocks in order, particularly in primary schools. This would be a very grave pity. A well informed and expert librarian can direct not just students but class room teachers to good information and quality resources and thus influence what goes on in the class room in a very positive way, ultimately for enormous public benefit. The possible down-grading of the teacher librarian in schools, if this has not already begun to happen, would be to fail to appreciate the importance of the role. We need, as a community, to give them their proper recognition. Indeed, my hunch is, thinking in the other direction, that class room teachers will become more like librarians and information professionals. Instead of being themselves the fount of all information and knowledge, they will become more like guides to good information and encouragers of learning and knowledge. This will be in addition to their role as policeman, for teenagers seem to be expert in finding new sites that we might prefer them not to visit. But this means that classroom teachers will increasingly need the back-up of the information professional.
But I think there is a sense in which the community, more widely considered, is dependent upon the teacher librarian, in whatever the kind of library it may be, not just in the school library. If libraries are to participate in the acquisition of knowledge as against being places for finding out bits of bare information, then it seems to me that diversification of activity may be an imperative of the future and one of the most important challenges that lie ahead for librarians.
This presupposes that it is possible and desirable for the public library, for example, to become not just a place where we go to find out things, but a lively centre for the transmission of culture and the acquisition of productive knowledge and the promotion of learning, even a stimulus of innovation and invention. If the repositioning of the library in the community in this kind of way is to happen there will of necessity be a whole range of community based learning activities centred in the library: focus groups, story time for children, the organization of children's reading clubs and adult literary discussion groups, creative writing groups, poetry groups, book clubs for older citizens, even with a cup of tea. Then there will be the possibility of archival displays, displays on topical themes, films, occasional talks, and lectures centred in the library. I guess I should put my cards on the table to declare that at this point I probably have the marvelous Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City in the back on my mind: Is it really a library? Is it a museum? Is it a gallery? It is probably best described as a mixture of all three.
If some of these activities do not actually happen in the library itself, the library is at least an obvious place for notices to go up to facilitate the bringing of like-minded people together in learning contexts elsewhere. But I would not want that to be a cop out. If the transition is to be made in community consciousness from the library as a repository of information to the understanding of it as a node of importance within the over-all infrastructure of a learning-driven and knowledge-driven society, the library itself will necessarily be a place of richly diverse activity.
From the community perspective I do not think we need worry over much about the possible development of a demarcation dispute between the library, the museum, and the gallery. There are about 1500 public libraries across Australia. This means that there will be libraries in many places where there is no museum or art gallery. We should not be too concerned about overlapping activities. Also, the library is unlikely to mount exhibitions of the magnitude of Monet and Japan or The Italians; the gallery will continue to do that. But exhibitions and displays of a smaller scale and with more narrowly focused themes seem to me to be important if the library is to play a role in facilitating the transition from the mere availability of information and even the development of computer literacy skills to the acquisition of productive knowledge and creative thought, so necessary if Australia is to become a learning-driven and knowledge-driven society.
We can leave it to universities to develop courses in speculative design, but the past can provide an inspiration to inventiveness. What I have in mind when I speak of small focused displays to stimulate the inventive imagination and a culture of inventiveness in the community would not just be a display illustrating how the telephone was invented, for example, or how Crick and Watson discovered DNA and where more follow-up information can be found, but one with a focus on explicitly Australian ingenuity and inventiveness, the mapping genius of Matthew Flinders at only 26 years of age which you already have an interest in, or a focus on who invented and in what circumstances the black box flight recorder, which as I understand it, was an Australian invention, or Ralph Sarrich's orbital engine, or the miraculous Cochlear hearing implants being produced in Melbourne.
I am drawing your attention to this current Australian community need because in the knowledge economy the patenting of new innovations and inventions is an important barometer of what is happening or not happening in the community, and the Australian trends are somewhat alarming. Twenty years ago Australian inventors had far more patents in the market than their counterparts in Israel and Taiwan; today we have fewer. It is a surprise to me to learn that patented Taiwanese inventions currently outnumber Australian four to one. These stretch across a range of fields from electronic applications to the designs of textiles and apparel and even business methods and processes. (l. Gettler, 'The Innovation Conundrum' Management Today October 2000, pp. 14-19).
Apart from the role of the library in stimulating the creative imagination and a culture of inventiveness, also of importance to the social and cultural life of the community will be displays of what is available, either on the shelves or downloaded from a particular web site, to stimulate people to learn about particular subjects of community interest and concern. The one that comes to mind at the moment is Islam: surely the well-being of our own community as a multicultural society, not to mention the peace of the whole world, will be served by a deeper community acquaintance with Islam. And where can a person go to pursue both sides of the contemporary debate about embryo and stem cell research? Believe me, and I know this from parish communities, there is a huge interest in the interface between science, and religion and morality right now.
So, the point is, as we think about the interface of the library and the community, that the community can be encouraged to see that the library is not just a repository for books and information but a mechanism for bringing people together in community so as to foster cultural and spiritual and moral values as well as learning and productive knowledge. It has a role to play in satisfying the hunger that all humans have for contact with others, and for interaction with other minds, and this is to be contrasted with the individualised use of the computer screen at home which in fact isolates.
In other words, I would want to support the contention that the library is a community centre that ministers to the well being of the whole community. I think therefore I have come to the view that it would be a mistake to try to justify the place of the free public library in the community on the grounds only that it offers a free service to those who would otherwise be denied access, particularly to post secondary educational opportunities. It may certainly do that, but that should happen automatically. I therefore think the role of the library and of the information professional in the context of the whole community must not be seen as providing a kind of stop-gap filling an educational need focused on a particular disadvantaged sector of the society. As important as that might be to ensure that all people in the community are able to participate in the knowledge economy, that would nevertheless be to under-estimate their importance.
It is said that 60 per cent of Australians use public libraries in one way or another, and amongst these there are high proportions of young people. I note that the statistical analysis of public library users and non-users of Colin Mercer and Des Stephens, which was published inCulture and Policy, Vol. 8. No. 1, 1997, shows that 21 per cent of State library users and 13 per cent of public library users are between 15 and 19 years of age. This is a significant section of the community. They are not necessarily economically disadvantaged people, but people who have to be kept in the loop, rather than being allowed to think that they can graduate to other things once they hit 20 years of age. I mentioned at the beginning my anecdotal awareness of the large numbers of retired people, and pensioners who use the Perth City Library. You must remember that my observation is of an inner city library not a suburban one where there are likely to be more children and young people around. A central city library is bound to have a distinctive clientele. I do note however that Mercer and Stephens confirm my own impression of high proportionate use of younger people not born in Australia, particularly of an Asian origin, in our public libraries.
But, while I am sure the public library of the City of Perth is important to the particular groups of people that have come to my attention coming and going from the library, retirees and pensioners, and young people from overseas, who might be considered disadvantaged, I do not think public policy should be based on the fact that a service is provided by libraries to identifiably disadvantaged sub-sections of the community, for libraries have an important role to play with regard to the whole community.
Indeed, the presence in our libraries of these very groups that I have mentioned raises a possibility which may be of benefit to everyone: this is the possibility of recruiting retirees as mentors, to help with the literacy problems of younger folk, and especially those not born in Australia such as those from South East Asia. Australia's place in a global knowledge economy means that there is a possibility for us to make a cultural and educational contribution that eventually will penetrate well beyond our own shores. But this runs both ways. Australia is geographically isolated, and in terms of ideology we are somewhat confused at the moment about international relations. We tend to be isolationist and suspicious of illegal migrants and refugees on one hand, while expressing an awareness of globalization, and talking of ourselves as part of Asia on the other. On the other hand, we certainly know the commercial opportunities that lie in countries to the north of us. Yet we make little effort as a community to remedy the impediment that is posed by our isolation to certain kinds of knowledge relating to those countries. In this context the recent decision to cut the Commonwealth funding of the Asian Languages programme in primary and secondary schools before its goals are met and before its planned terminus in 2006 is beyond comprehension. A knowledge of language and culture is the kind of knowledge that may be of enormous significance in the business and commercial world. The library, as a multi-functional resource with its holdings both of audio tape language learning programmes, and cultural information about places, can help break down the alienation experienced by most Australians as a consequence of our geographical isolation. Add to this the fact that young people from South East Asia rank statistically amongst the most frequent users of our public libraries, and it seems to me we have the ingredients for bringing both information and people together into a very fertile and creative mix. If voluntary retirees can mentor younger people to enhance literacy skills; younger people from South East Asia can help the conversation skills of Australian businessmen. Can the librarian become a kind of subtle social engineer to facilitate an authentic learning experience that would be of enormous benefit to the community, not only socially and culturally but commercially?
The repositioning of libraries in public consciousness in this kind of way might be thought to be important for the development of a national policy with the hope of accessing increased funding, perhaps at the federal level, given that most library funding is State or local. In the climate of economic rationalism that might not appear too promising right now. I certainly would not hold my breath if I were you. We would need an ideological revolution in Canberra for this to happen. However, the same positioning of libraries as diversified centres for the promotion of a learning-driven, knowledge-driven society should also be attractive from the point of view of the private sector. To date the kind of public philanthropy that I have in mind has not been a feature of Australian culture. I wonder where libraries are in relation to development programmes, and whether many libraries have groups of 'Friends of the Library' dedicated to the promotion of the library's interests in the community and drawing their needs to the attention of possible benefactors. I hear of 'Friends of the Gallery' from time to time but do not hear much about the activities of 'Friends of the Library'. Once again the increasing number of retirees with a fund of skills may be a windfall in running development programmes. How many libraries have a sign up on their notice board saying 'Have you remembered the library in your will?' Certainly, libraries have an opportunity to promote a philanthropic culture in Australia and to be beneficiaries of it. So if I were to do a Walter Mitty and imagine myself as a librarian facing the information needs of the community right now, and I think I can do this without threatening your job (it is a little late for me to think of a vocation change), I think I would be appointing a programmes officer and a development officer - voluntary if they cannot be from the start stipendiary.
Your profession is essentially a service profession, you are dedicated to serving the needs of others, and this, of course, is enormously commendable. But there is always a time to treat yourselves. If I can take a line from John F Kennedy and turn it on its head, I think there is a time to ask not just 'what can I do for the community; but what can the community do for me.' For private sector support to materialise in a whole range of ways, I think libraries have to position themselves so as to be seen as important for the cultural and commercial life of whole communities. I do not see this happening without a lively programme of diversified activities. Amongst other learning institutions, the museum and the gallery, can libraries also become centres which are important for helping people make the transition from accessing atomistic bits of information to real learning and productive knowledge, and even centres of innovation and inventiveness?
So, as part of the overall educational and cultural infrastructure of the knowledge economy, can libraries intentionally see themselves as centres for stimulating creativity, imagination, and even speculative design? Even better, can libraries be seen as dynamic centres in the community of social, spiritual and moral transformation? I hope so.