11th National Library Technicians Conference

Enabling the knowledge nation: What Australia needs in the 21st century

Dr Alan Bundy President: Australian Library and Information Association

Abstract
The 21st century will be the century of the mind, characterised by information access and utilisation, knowledge development and lifelong learning.

Australia has many issues to address if it is to prosper societally and economically in the 21st century. These issues include economic development, international competitiveness, education, environmental sustainability, the health of the nation, Aboriginal reconciliation, social inclusion and sustenance of an open democracy. These issues can only be addressed through the effective use of one critical resource - information. They will be best addressed by a technorealist nation which recognises that technology alone is not a solution or panacea. A complementary human and specialist response is needed, which library professionals are well placed to help meet. The challenge to those professionals, and their professional association, is to foster a greater awareness within all sectors of the community of what they already contribute, and of their potential to contribute even more to an information literate knowledge nation.

Introduction
As a country, and globally, we face many uncertainties. One of the few certainties about the 21st century is that it will be a century of the mind characterised by information abundance and overload. Realising a vision of Australia as an information enabled knowledge nation requires, however, the enhanced ability of Australia's libraries and library professionals to anticipate, identify and meet society's information needs. It also requires recognition that information literacy, not information technology, is the critical issue of the information age.

What Australia needs - libraries and library professionals at the vanguard
Like other developed countries, a major characteristic of Australia's development in the 21st century will be the knowledge economy where the nation's wealth will not depend on its ability to produce and convert raw materials, but on the abilities and intellect of its citizens and the skills with which organisations harness and develop those abilities. As a 1999 UK consultancy report put it

For organisations to compete effectively in the knowledge economy they need to change their values and establish a new focus on creating and using intellectual assets. To be successful in this environment individuals need to acquire new combinations of skills. In particular they need to learn skills that allow them to find, manage, share and use information and knowledge - they need 'information literacy'...[1]

However, for Australia, the conclusions of the April 2001 report The competitive performance of Australia as a knowledge nation are not comforting

Despite certain favourable starting points, Australia has fallen behind most of the OECD in investment in knowledge. The ratio between investment in knowledge and investment in fixed capital assets is trending downwards, marking Australia as an 'old economy'. While other nations are moving ahead with public investment in R&D and education, Australia is stuck in the cost cutting and privatisation policies of the previous era. In doing so it is placing its future position in a knowledge based world seriously at risk.[2]

As the prime minister of Singapore, Goh Chok Tong, has observed:

The future belongs to countries whose people make the most productive use of information, knowledge, and technology.

Australia has been relatively slow to recognise this, although both the federal government and the opposition have come some way, more particularly the Opposition in its July report An agenda for the knowledge nation http://www.alp.org.au/, which at recommendation 17 states that Australia needs a national information policy.

Libraries at the vanguard
Another characteristic of Australia in this century will be a focus on learning cities or communities and lifelong learning, the latter of which since the publication of the 1996 UNESCO Delors Report Learning: the treasure within,[3] is becoming an educational policy icon worldwide. However, those engaged in formal education tend to think of lifelong learning in terms of traditional structures, with their panoplies of curriculum, teaching, assessment and certification. Many do not see that the largest force - and certainly at an average of 6c per Australian per day, the most cost effective - for learning in Australia is its network of 1600 public libraries. These libraries, used by 12 million Australians, cost in total the same as just one large Australian university with 30 000 students. This is about $450 million pa, none of which is provided directly by the federal government. Mark Latham in his speeches and in his latest book What did you learn today?[4] emphasises the lifelong learning point well:

We are entering a new phase in education policy. The focus is moving beyond the classroom and into the learning institutions of civil society. This is the natural terrain of public libraries. In Australian politics, we need to move beyond motherhood statements and slogans about lifelong learning and give this concept real policy grunt. We need to face up to the shortcomings of the current system.

Many educators and institutions say that they are already engaged in lifelong learning. For their students, this is undoubtedly true. The challenge is to reach those Australians who are outside the silos of learning - the one in four who never go back. This is the bottom line for lifelong learning: policies and programs which reach out to non-learners and make education an engaging part of their lives.

If public libraries do not succeed in this task, then it is difficult to conceive of a universal system of learning. For those of us who believe in an inclusive and just society, libraries are at the vanguard of our hopes and policy plans.

Mark Lathams's points are reinforced by Richard Curtain, a consultant specialising in public policy who, writing on 6 June 2001,[5] observed that:

One obstacle to lifelong learning is that the various elements of the formal learning system are disjointed, and often fail to meet the needs of learners. Efforts to coordinate between departments within governments, between governments, and with and among service provider are not only difficult to achieve. They often fail to focus on the learner to meet their needs and achieve their specified outcomes.

A second obstacle to lifelong learning is a lack of motivation. Surveys show that most people say they are too busy to undertake job related training. This may be partly due to a resistance to further participation in formal learning. A high proportion of Australian adults (44 per cent of people aged 16-64 in 1996) have literacy levels that the OECD deems insufficient to cope with work and modern life.

The lack of motivation to learn may also be due to how learning is defined and delivered. ANTA's market research shows that recognition of prior learning (RPL) has great appeal because it affirms the value of people's learning experiences by encouraging them and their employer to build on existing skills. But for a range of reasons, education providers limit opportunities for RPL.

Lifelong learning is also substantially hindered by the lack of financial incentives to encourage individuals and enterprises to invest in learning.

A greater focus on the learner is required for lifelong learning to work. We need to empower learners and potential learners with information, tools and incentive structures.

The information issue - IL, not IT
In developed countries worldwide, therefore, a policy icon of 21st century education is becoming cradle to grave lifelong learning. The knowledge economy and knowledge management is also a focus for many organisations and nation states. Yet not one of the three levels of Australian government, nor one of the three levels of Australian formal education - primary, secondary, tertiary - has really grasped the impossibility of sustaining lifelong learning, a knowledge economy, and effective knowledge management, without Information Literacy - the capacity to recognise the need for information, to identify, find and access the needed information, and then synthesise, evaluate and apply it. Information Literacy (IL) is a conceptualisation led by librarians in the early 1970s, although the term itself was coined by a non-librarian Paul Zurkowski in 1974. Rapid recognition of the concept and of its relationship to lifelong learning has occurred in several countries since the early 1990s, thanks largely to librarians.

Again, mainly due to its teacher-librarians and librarians, Australia is well up with countries such as the US, Canada, Singapore, Finland and Sweden in IL promotion and initiatives.

In promoting information literacy as the key issue of the information age, teacher-librarians and librarians have largely stood alone. What educational bureaucrats, politicians and governments have tended to grasp is the glittery but slippery straw of information technology (IT), generally aided by a gullible media. This has been at great cost - c$3 billion in Australian schools alone - but with little demonstrable return on investment. And some of the federal government's Networking the Nation initiatives also fail to achieve their full potential. They may reduce the digital divide but not the more fundamental information divide. An increasing number of Australian and overseas commentators (such as Walt Crawford, Michael Gorman and Jamie McKenzie) and websites such as http://www.technorealism.org have roundly criticised the misplaced act of faith which inappropriate technology in education currently represents. Too much funding and student time is being wasted on the wrong information age issue - information technology. Too little is being invested in the real issue - information literacy. For example, school libraries lack resources and enough qualified teacher-librarians and library technicians while banks of computers sit under-utilised in classrooms throughout Australia.

Why is information literacy the real issue?
In 1860 Victorian social commentators were lamenting the stress created by overabundant information.

The perceived overabundance of information in 1860 is, of course, insignificant compared with the figures from the 2000 study How much information? [http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/summary.html] that the world's total annual production of print, film, optical and magnetic content would require the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for every person on earth. Print documents only account for a very small part of the total, but still include 65 million titles, and 2.75 billion book sales a year.

In those statistics, can be sensed the reasons for the infoglut, infobog, infowhelm, information tsunami, information anxiety, information fatigue syndrome, information vertigo, data asphyxiation, datasmog - or just plain information overload - which is increasingly reported in the research or described by commentators.

This suggests that there should be a common political, governmental, corporate, trade union, educational, health services, and community awareness of the issue and of the consequential importance of giving the information literacy development of all citizens, from an early age, researched, systematic, co-ordinated and well-funded attention. Such is not the case. It is still given attention, if at all, in an erratic ill co-ordinated fashion and has yet to surface at a national political level. Yet if only twenty-five per cent of the $3 billion or so which is currently being largely wasted by state governments on IT in schools were systematically invested in information literacy as the real issue of the information age, Australia would unquestionably be much better placed to become a clever country or knowledge nation. To the mantra about the return to the 3Rs must now be added IL for information literacy, because without information literacy the 3Rs and conventional literacy have little utility of empowerment in a 21st century 'age of information'.

Print literacy remains, however, a prerequisite for the development of Information Literacy. It remains a major educational and societal challenge, to which good libraries and more teacher and children's librarians are an important part of the needed response.

Information literacy, as the 2001 national Information literacy standards [http://www.caul.edu.au/] demonstrates, has substance. It is not a passing fad. Rather it is, as Professor Candy from the University of Ballarat has stated, the zeitgeist of the 21st century - a tangible, meaningful prerequisite for addressing its challenges. Lynne Brindley, the new CEO of the British Library, has recently described the issue well

Only being at the receiving end and not for the most part being in control of information flows, particularly through the large hose pipe of the internet, is stressful and undesirable. Many of us are hampered by an education that inadequately trains us to process this glut of information.

So, in strides the concept of Information Literacy, or information fluency, competency, or even mediacy. Call it what you will, the basic concept is fundamentally important - to ensure that at all levels we have the confidence, skills and understanding to harness information and knowledge as assets in all parts of our lives. Information Literacy is as much a central plank of social inclusion (for it helps to make complicated things easily accessible to people in a complex, information society), as it is of education (from schools, through university, and through lifelong learning), and as part of the successful knowledge based corporation, where Information Literacy has sometimes become attached to knowledge management initiatives.[6]

The importance of information literacy is succinctly conveyed in the recent ALIA Statement on Information Literacy for all Australians

The first object of the Australian Library and Information Association is 'To promote the free flow of information and ideas in the interest of all Australians and a thriving culture, economy and democracy'.

A thriving national and global culture, economy and democracy will be best advanced by people able to recognize their need for information, and identify, locate, access, evaluate and apply the needed information.

Information literacy is a prerequisite for

• participative citizenship;
• social inclusion;
• the creation of new knowledge;
• personal empowerment; and
• learning for life.

Library and information services professionals therefore embrace a responsibility to develop the information literacy of their clients.

They will support governments at all levels, and the corporate, community, professional, educational and trade union sectors, in promoting and facilitating the development of Information Literacy for all Australians as a high priority during the 21st century.

The 1994 information literacy policy statement of the Australian School Library Association (ASLA) is more discursive than the ALIA statement, but makes some useful additional points about why Information Literacy is important.

Information is as essential to our survival as water, food, shelter and sleep. Information is, however, much more than a survival tool. Information unleashes our imagination and challenges our preconceptions and thereby provides us with a pathway to personal growth and fulfilment.

Throughout history the processing of information has been essential to assist human survival and growth. The last few decades have witnessed an amazing increase in the quantity of information and the Australian workforce is now concentrated around the collection, analysis, manipulation and communication of that information. Change has been so dramatic that Australia can now be described as an information society.

Today's decision makers are often overwhelmed with information and the challenge for them is to choose that which is appropriate. Effective decision making is built upon timely access to this information and the ability to process the available information to suit the requirements of the decision. This problem exists for the aged, for those in employment, for the unemployed and for those who are at school.

The need to be able to use information effectively has in many cases become more important that the acquiring of factual knowledge itself. The sum total of information increases at such a rate each day that yesterday's best answer may be known to be incorrect today. Much of what many children learn during their school life will be quite obsolete by the time they enter the workforce.

Effective learners are not just those people who are knowledgeable but rather they are people who are able to find and use information as required. We might say that effective learners are those who are information literate. Information literacy is synonymous with knowing how to learn. This means that the ability to process and use information effectively is more than a basic tool for the empowerment of school students: it is in fact the basic survival skill for those who wish to be successful in the 1990s and beyond.

(Source: Australian School Library Association and Australian Library and Information Association, Learning for the future: developing information services in Australian schools, Curriculum Corporation, 1993.)

From the above, several bold but irrefutable conclusions can be drawn. These conclusions have very significant implications for librarianship in the 21st century.

• Information, knowledge, learning community and lifelong learning issues will dominate in the 21[st] century, and likely beyond.
• The more that citizens have access to information - and the Information Literacy to use it - that is relevant to local, national and global socioeconomic and political development, the more they will prosper.
• The more information rights citizens have the more they will be free, if we accept the Jeffersonian tenet that 'information is the currency of democracy'.
• The more and better libraries and library professionals a country has, the better its information will be identified, acquired, managed, made available and used.
• The more and better libraries and library professionals a country has, the greater the opportunities for the citizens of that country to become information literate contributors to it.
• The more and better libraries and library professionals a country has the more socially inclusive it can become.

Why more libraries, librarians and library technicians?

Those last three assertions about the need for more and better libraries and library professionals are bold, but assert them we must. It would be irresponsible not to do so. We should do so with the confidence that we really do have something to contribute to Australia's future as a nation of knowledge, and perhaps even of wisdom.

Librarianship has four unusual characteristics, all of which are not without significance

• It is the only profession which is named for the places within which its members have focused their activities - but it has never been a profession bound by those places.
• It is the most co-operative and sharing of professions - at a local, national and global level.
• It gives of itself - many professions have a proprietary interest in keeping unto themselves.
• It is committed to the free flow of information in society, to intellectual freedom, and to social inclusion.

All of those characteristics are generalisations about a profession which is - like many professions today - recognisably a broad church. However they are characteristics which bear reflection on.

The library as place
The most apposite commentary on this issue is by Michael Gorman who, in his paper New libraries, old values given at the ALIA 98 conference in Adelaide, observed

One would have thought that the last thing the world needed was another force tending to isolation and alienation, but that is exactly what is implied in the chatter about virtual libraries without walls, etc. Insofar as the practicalities of a virtual library are known, they must include the abolition of the library as a place; human beings interacting with the records of humankind in isolation and communicating with other human beings electronically; and an economic model that is predicated on access to recorded knowledge and information being conditioned by, and dependent on, a fee for use basis. If such a future were to come about - which it will not for a variety of practical reasons - can you imagine a more potent recipe for social alienation?

The virtual library is also called the library without walls (a favourite term of those who do not give a hang about libraries but know how much library buildings cost to build and maintain). First, libraries have always reached out beyond their walls and will continue to do so - such service being greatly enhanced, but not changed in nature, by electronic communication. It suits people who push the digital solution to everything to characterise libraries and librarians as place-bound,but saying does not make it so. Library service is rooted in placed called libraries but has never been bound by those places. Just look at, for example, mobile libraries, services to the housebound and the incarcerated, telephone and e-mail reference services, and interlibrary resource sharing.

One simple reason why we need and will continue to need places called libraries is that we will have to house, arrange and make accessible collections of physical library materials for the indefinite future. To believe otherwise is to believe that, for the first time since the invention of writing, new technologies will not enhance but supplant forms of communication based on previous technologies.[7]

As Walt Crawford emphasized in a 1999 article in American libraries the age of information is a metaphor, an organizing principle and an image, and that things go awry when people seize on that image and reshape their views of reality to fit it. He contends that:

Ages are what people make them. Technology works when people need and use it. People don't fit neatly into simple models, but people - in their complex, confusing aggregate - determine which technologies survive, which ones become significant but minor niches, which ones linger on without significance, and which one sink without a trace.

Libraries serve people. Libraries will prosper in the future by serving people's diverse interests and needs, not by asserting that librarians know what people should want and how they should acquire information, knowledge, and recreation. People require a mix of analog and digital resources to serve their preferences and abilities; libraries should honour those requirements.[8]

Co-operation and sharing
Until someone can find a better example, let us assert and take pride in what Librarianship has achieved, and does achieve, by co-operation and sharing even in a more competitive world. Co-operation and sharing is not just a pragmatic response to need. It is a core value of our profession.

A commitment to the free flow of information
On 14 December 1946 the UN General Assembly resolved that:

Freedom of information is a fundamental human right, and the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated.

Librarianship has that fundamental human right at the core of what it professes.

In as much as it is the voice of the profession, ALIA's first object therefore distinguishes librarianship from all other professions in Australia

Object 1

To promote the free flow of information and ideas in the interest of all Australians and a thriving culture, economy and democracy.

That object - with its implicit high emphasis on access and use - is symbolic of a difference in emphasis between Librarianship and what might be seen as the allied professions of archives and records management.

The Australian Society of Archivists' mission, for example, states

Archivists ensure that records which have value as authentic evidence of administrative, corporate, cultural and intellectual activity are made, kept and used. The work of archivists is vital for ensuring organisational efficiency and accountability and for supporting understandings of Australian life through the management and retention of its personal, corporate and social memory.

Further afield is the Records Management Association of Australia, which has as its mission:

To market records management and the skills of the records management profession to provide a forum to debate and develop records management principles and record keeping techniques. The Records Management Association of Australia promotes best practice in records management as a vital business activity.

and as its first object:

To become a world leader in records and information innovations and challenges

Even the largest Australian library association after ALIA, the Australian School Library Association, in its objects has no specification of societal mission, its first four objects being quite targeted:

• Be the national authority in the field of school library resource services and teacher-librarianship.
• Establish, review and maintain national standards and guidelines for school library resource services.
• Promote an understanding of the aims, needs and educational significance of school library resource services and teacher-librarianship.
• Maintain the awareness of government bodies of the needs and educational significance of school library resource services and advise them on all matters concerning school library resource services and teacher-librarianship.

Interestingly, the profession closest philosophically to librarianship is arguably journalism, and it is good to see how many empathetic articles about libraries by journalists are now appearing - a development which we should encourage to raise our profile. This, in part, is what the AJA's Code of Ethics and its recommended revisions, states:

Respect for truth and the public's right to know are overriding principles for all journalists.

Journalists describe society to itself. They seek truth. They convey information, ideas and opinions, a privileged role. They search, disclose, record, question, entertain, suggest and remember. They inform citizens and animate democracy.

Or as the editorial of The Australian 31 May 2001 stated

The free flow of information and opinion is crucial to the health of any democracy. That is a position a newspaper has to take but it is no less true for that.

Curiously, however, the AJA Code of Ethics does not make specific reference to resistance to censorship, although journalists should not suppress 'relevant available facts'.

The Australian Library and Information Association's Statement on a professional ethics does make specific reference to censorship

Librarians and library technicians significantly influence or control the selection, organisation, preservation and dissemination of information. In a political system dependent upon an informed democratic society, they are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and the freedom of access to information. Librarians and library technicians have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.

Librarians and library technicians are dependent upon one another for the bibliographical resources used to provide effective information services, and this dependence imposes obligations for the maintenance of the highest level of personal integrity and competence in the performance of their duties.

Librarians and library technicians

1. Must provide the highest level of service to all clients through appropriate and usefully organised collections, equitable access and service policies and skilful, accurate and unbiased responses to all legitimate requests for assistance.
2. Should not exercise censorship in the selection, use, or access to material by rejecting on moral, political, gender, sexual preference, racial or religious grounds alone, material which is otherwise relevant to the purpose of the library and meets the standards which are appropriate to the library concerned. Material must not be rejected on the grounds that its content is controversial or likely to offend some sections of the library's community.
3. Must recognise and respect intellectual property rights and in compiling information for clients must avoid manipulation of information likely to mislead.
4. Must protect each user's right to privacy with respect to information sought or received and materials consulted.
5. Must distinguish clearly in their actions and statements between their personal philosophies and attitudes and those of an employing institution or professional body.
6. Must treat fellow workers and other colleagues with respect, fairness and good faith and advocate conditions of employment that safeguard the rights and welfare of all employees of the institution.
7. Must avoid situations in which personal interests might be served or financial benefits gained at the expense of library users, colleagues or the employing institution.
8. Must maintain and enhance their professional knowledge and skills to ensure excellence in the profession by encouraging the professional development of co-workers and by fostering the aspirations of potential members of the profession.

Values
It is predictable that the 21st century will see an increasing emphasis on the values which drive major contributors to society such as corporations, professions and associations. As Czechowicz observes:

An organisation's goals may need to be formulated into a clear and memorable format. But values go deeper than goals, underpinning all the activities that get organisations to their goals. They require deeper reflection. The challenge with goals is to achieve them. The challenge with values is to live up to them.[9]

In that context it behoves any profession or association to reflect on, and iterate clearly, its own core values. Those of librarianship and of ALIA are buried within the Statement of professional ethics and would benefit from extraction, as the American Library Association (ALA) has done, albeit after considerable debate. It was for this reason the Board of Directors of ALIA proposed in the September 2000 issue of inCite a draft statement on core values similar to those of ALA, and which in turn are informed by Michael Gorman's statement that:

Those of us who believe in real libraries serving real people need, now more than ever, to reaffirm our values and value.

The values that should underpin our work in libraries are

• stewardship;
• service;
• intellectual freedom;
• privacy;
• rationalism;
• commitment to literacy and learning;
• unfettered access to recorded knowledge and information; and
• democracy.

Every single last one of these values is explicitly or implicitly under attack from those who tout the virtual library, the library without walls, and all the other vapidities of the digerati.[10]

The reaction to the ALIA draft statement was mixed, ranging from strong support to questioning of the need, so at present the issue of core values is suspended, but should not be for too long. At this stage, it will be an issue for debate at ALIA's second National Policy Congress in December this year.

The draft was

Assurance of free and open access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works We recognise unfettered access to ideas across time and across cultures is fundamental to society and to civilisation.

Connection of people to ideas We guide and educate the seeker in defining and refining the search; foster intellectual enquiry and freedom; and nurture communication in all forms and formats.

Commitment to literacy, information literacy and learning We foster independent lifelong learning by providing resources that meet the differing needs of all learners and entertain and delight the human spirit.

Respect for the individuality and the diversity of all people We honour each request without bias, and meet it with the fullness of tools at our command. We respect privacy, confidentiality, and the right of access to library and information services and resources regardless of race, creed, national origin, age, ability, gender, or sexual orientation.

Preservation of the human record We seek to preserve the cultural memory of humankind and its many families, its stories, its expertise, its history, and its evolved wisdom so it may illuminate the present and make the future possible.

Excellence in professional service to our communities We are committed to integrity, competence, personal growth, effective stewardship, and service to our profession and to our public.

Partnerships to advance these values We believe in the interdependence of libraries and library staff and advocate collaboration between all types of libraries and information services for the public and private good.

The reason why the issue of core values should not be left too long is that they are needed to underpin ALIA's objects and the statement on professional ethics, because both of them make a strong claim for the role and importance of librarianship in the 21st century.

All three are needed if the profession is to become a dynamic and irresistible force for the public and private good. The reality is that the profession in the 21st century will be unable to achieve its potential without motivated, well educated and values-driven professionals with the very high interpersonal skills required to articulate, advocate and evangelise the unique contribution of librarianship to society.

Professional education
This raises major questions about preservice education for librarianship in Australia, and how to attract the best people to the 21st century profession. In part because of the constraints on the universities and TAFE, most library schools in Australia are now weak in their staffing numbers and capacity for curricular innovation, much needed research, and continuing professional development. Nor is it the case that motivated and high quality students are attracted by the library schools in large enough numbers.

Australian library schools preparing librarians have also all but lost their identity and strong leadership. The following viewpoint of John Berry, editor in chief of the US Library Journal resonates with the Australian situation:

Year after year students complain that the 'core' LIS curriculum includes much too little course work in such fundamental library specialisations as service to children or the elderly. There is too little education on serving those for whom English is a second language, or those whose economic status has prevented them from full participation in the new digital age.

The schools have made giant steps in the teaching of the new information technology but few have strong courses that deal with the public policy issues stemming from that technological change. They need curricula modernisation in public information policy, in copyright, in the management of intellectual content, and in a host of public policy issues directly related to that complicated mix. We now realise how ill prepared librarians were to tackle such complicated policy issues as internet access for children and all the political fallout that engendered.

The running of libraries is not the 'old fashioned' sector of library and information studies. A graduate program that focuses on libraries must be upgraded to deal with the administrative, political, service, and technology concerns faced by the modern library. Compared to most businesses and nearly all public agencies, America's libraries are way out on the cutting edge.

Unfortunately, the programs to which we turn for a supply of well educated leaders to manage and maintain libraries have lavished their attention on curricula to 'meet new employers' needs', to quote Kaliper again. In that process, the educational needs of their primary and dominant market, libraries, have been neglected.

Those who run a so called 'traditional' library school program should take heart. They serve the agency riding farthest out on the cutting edge and deepest in the trenches of service in our information society. Moreover, that is the agency in which nine out of ten 1999 graduates found employment. We need programs of library education that more precisely prepare the overwhelming number of graduates for the real work they do.

The only thing which perhaps could be added to that assessment of the US situation is that no Australian library school is preparing librarians or library technicians for their role as facilitators of an information literate nation.

Librarianship - a broad church
Earlier in this paper, librarianship was described as a 'broad church'. It is certainly a profession which has moved some way from what the Macquarie Dictionary defines as

A profession concerned with organising collections of books and related materials in libraries and of making these resources available to readers and others.

Prima facie, there is a considerable operational distance between a cataloguer, an acquisitions technician, a children's librarian, a local studies technician, a teacher librarian, an information literacy librarian, a library educator, a library consultant and an information specialist. However what is important is to focus on professional connectivity through shared understandings, values, ethics and practice. It is also important to actively resist the professional myopia and silo mentality which allows an information specialist to know nothing about public library issues, or a public library technician to know nothing about issues for teacher-librarians, or a university librarian to know nothing about special library issues etc. Membership of a broad association like ALIA is one effective investment in avoiding that professional myopia.

Libraries - the past
It is also very important that we have a strong sense of the past in preparing for a challenging and exciting future. The last 100 years of Australian library development have been indeed an odyssey - a long and eventful journey since federation.

Consider, for example, that in 1900 Australia had less than 40 free rate-supported public libraries, and as late as 1934 there were still 2000 grossly inadequate institute subscription libraries, used by 3% of the population compared with the 60% using today's 1600 public libraries. The watershed Munn-Pitt Report[11] on Australian libraries was published in 1935, and provoked 101 articles and editorials in the nation's newspapers. This was not surprising in view of the report's suggestion that:

Anyone wishing to carry away a favourable impression of the Public Library of Queensland should never make the mistake of entering it.

and

As a whole, Australia was better provided with local libraries in the 1880s than it is today... It is pathetic to observe the pride and complacency with which local committees exhibit wretched little institutions which have long since become cemeteries of old and forgotten books.

Nor could Munn and Pitt find, in the whole of Australia, one good example of a school library. There were also very few qualified librarians, and, of course, library technicians formally existed not at all.

Libraries - the present
Australian national, state, public, university and other tertiary libraries are now broadly comparable with the world's best, and few schools of any size do not have a library. The most volatile sector has been special libraries, but largely because of institutional changes rather than any targeting of libraries. Most successful institutions of any size recognise the value of investing in libraries and library professionals, albeit those special libraries are increasingly electronic and their libraries described as 'information specialists' or 'knowledge managers'. In fact electronic developments in many libraries will predictably require less physical handling of resources and possibly reduced employment of library assistants - but more employment of librarians and library technicians to exploit for users what they provide access to.

Whilst recognising the tensions about the respective roles of library technicians and librarians, it is also salutary to remember that very few countries have developed library competencies and the education and recognition of library technicians as far as has Australia, largely due to ALIA. Even fewer countries have a national professional association which has had the inclusive commonsense to endeavour to provide for complementary streams of the profession, although library technicians still do not contribute proportionate to their numbers. Library professionals - librarians and library technicians - who invoke cost, time and personal reasons not to participate in their professional association do need to reconsider their position objectively. Without ALIA their education and qualifications would have no standing, and without that ALIA there would be nobody arguing and resourcing the case for more and better funded libraries, and thus more library professional employment. Ultimately, library professionals who do not engage with their national professional association are gaining advantage from those who do. Such a limited perspective is not professional.

Libraries - the future
We have achieved much since federation, but much clearly still challenges the profession. Not the least of these challenges is getting through to the easily beguiled - politicians, bureaucrats, educrats and the media included - that the internet and information technology is no informational or educational panacea, and that reducing the 'digital divide' is not synonymous with reducing the 'information divide'.

There is also the challenge of sustaining and increasing the public good investment in libraries and Information Literacy for the nation when private interest and 'greed is good' still dominates public policy. However as US historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr has observed, such cycles peak about every 30 years and that:

Private interest eras do not go on forever. Rest replenishes the national energies; problems neglected demand remedy; greed as the point of existence seems inadequate. After a time people begin to ask not what their country can do for them but what they can do for their country.

Another challenge is the myopia and negativity which can afflict our profession as much as it can afflict society as a whole. There will always be some who see the library glass as half empty, and getting emptier rather than half full, and filling.

In that context we should be mindful of how privileged we are to be library professionals. Just how privileged was brought home to me earlier this year when I presented an ALIA award in Queensland to a member who had had to grapple with the crisis of discovering her daughter is heroin dependent. That member told me that in her interaction with families in a similar situation their recognition of their need for information - that critical first characteristic of the information literate individual - was usually lacking. As she observed in her acceptance speech for the award.

During the last three years I cannot tell you how much I have appreciated being a librarian. The skills I have acquired over the years have been extremely valuable. I now run a support group for the families and friends of those with a member who has a substance abuse problem and I have actively campaigned for reforms in the area of drug policy. Being a librarian has provided me with access to information, the ability to speak in public, confidence in my own knowledge base, and a willingness to listen.

We sometimes forget how very privileged we are as librarians. We are information rich and I work voluntarily with many who are information poor. We are all deserving of this award because as librarians we add value to our society.

That member is a librarian, and spoke as one. if she had been a library technician, she could well have made similar recognition of privilege.

So one way that our glass is filling is that there is now a great opportunity and responsibility for all parts of our professional broad church to join in leading the Information Literacy campaign at a higher, political level. This is about:

• creating a genuinely fairer, more equal and inclusive society;
• enhancing democracy in a meaningful way;
• helping to develop the knowledge economy; and
• developing a national information strategy for Australia.

If library professionals do not provide that leadership, no other professionals will.

There is also a real window of opportunity for the profession, through ALIA, to assert that Australia's performance as a knowledge nation in the 21st century requires more librarians and library technicians than we see currently employed in this country's academic, special, public and school libraries. Indeed, a fundamental indicator of whether a country is a knowledge nation should be its per capita and GDP percentage investment in its library and information services and library professionals. A knowledge nation which does not capitalise on its libraries and library professionals is implausible.

Getting that message through at the political and policy level requires a strong, well resourced, national association, supported by more professionals focused on what they - through their association - can do to make their country a better place for all. That, more than anything else, is what Australia needs to underpin the case for effective access to, and use of, information to achieve an information enabled society able to grapple with its myriad 21st century challenges.

References
[1] Skills for knowledge management a briefing paper for The Library and Information Commission 1999 p1 http://www.tfpl.com
[2] Considene, M, Marginson, S, Sheehan, P, The comparative performance of Australia as a knowledge nation Report to the Chifley Research Centre, April 2001
[3] Delors, J, Learning: the treasure within Unesco, Paris 1996
[4] Latham, M, What did you learn today? Sydney, Allen and Unwin 2001
[5] Curtain, R, How to implement a comprehensive lifelong learning strategy Adult Learning Commentary 13, 6 June 2001 http://www.ala.asn.au
[6] Brindley, L, An opportunity for us Information world review March 2001 p5
[7] Gorman, M, New libraries, old values Pathways to knowledge ALIA 98 conference, Adelaide. Canberra, ALIA 1999 p29-30
[8] Crawford, W, The card catalog and other digital controversies: what's obsolete and what's not in the age of information American libraries January 1999 p57
[9] Czecbwicz, J, Values added Management today April 2001 p19
[10] Gorman op cit p30
[11] Munn, R and Pitt, E, Australian libraries: a survey of conditions and suggestions for their improvement Melbourne, ACER 1935

Author
Alan Bundy BADipEd MLitt MLib PhD FALIA AFAIM has worked in public, TAFE and academic libraries in WA, Victoria and SA since 1963. He established Auslib Press in 1986 and was appointed foundation university librarian of the University of South Australia in 1992. He is ALIA national president, a position he also held in 1988, when he initiated and sponsored the Library Technician of the Year Award. alan.bundy@unisa.edu.au.