STRAIT to the future

8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference

Opening 8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians conference

The Honourable Sir Guy Green AC KBE
Governor of Tasmania
Hobart 23 August 1999

I would like to add my welcome to you all to this conference.

I add a special welcome to all our visitors from interstate and overseas. We are delighted to see you.

Your particular areas of endeavour which involve focusing upon the specialist requirements of health or legal professionals or the organisations of which your special libraries are a part fall into a most interesting category of library work. And that is reflected in the fascinating variety of the topics which will be covered at this conference. But of course as well as the demands of your own specialist areas you also face the wider challenges which confront the entire profession and it's about some of those that I would like to say something this morning.

Foremost amongst those challenges are those which have been created by three revolutionary changes which have been taking place at an accelerating rate during the second half of this century. The most influential, the most obvious and the one which is unique to our age has of course been the advent of computers and information technology. That technology has given us a capacity to create, manipulate and communicate information on a scale never before imagined. The word revolutionary is often misused but it can properly be used to describe these developments, they having started a process which will have at least as great an impact on human history as did Gutenberg's invention of printing by moveable type.

The second change is partly but not entirely the product of the first and that is the astronomical rate at which the stock of information available to us is growing. Some idea of the scale of that growth is conveyed by the astonishing estimate that the total stock of human knowledge is doubling every four and a half years. I am wary of estimates like that but various measures suggest that the rate is of that order.

Another measure of the rate of that increase is the rate at which the size of the English language is increasing. As new objects, relationships, concepts and processes are discovered or created and as human beings increase the range of the things which they are capable of doing, so new words must be found to label all those new things and actions. Even though the English language almost certainly already contains more words than any other language, during the last 35 years it has grown by the addition of some 70 000 words. Initially I rather doubted whether that figure too could possibly be correct but then I realised that it is confirmed by the fact that the first Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary published in 1933 comprised 12 volumes, the second Edition published 50 years later comprised 20 volumes and I understand the version now found on the CD ROM contains even more words.

The third change, which may in the end turn out to be the most radical of them all, affects the way we understand the very nature of information itself. There is a natural tendency to think of information in terms of its derivative forms, equating it with physical things like electronic states or words or images on a screen or a piece of paper rather than thinking about it in terms of its intrinsic nature. But what has emerged in recent years is the startling concept of information as a distinct entity in itself which can be regarded along with matter and energy as one of the fundamental components of the physical world. That sort of insight into the character of information is not only of intellectual interest but can provide illuminating insights for those who are concerned with storing, handling and using information. It is a liberating concept because it encourages one to think about information and how to handle it without the constraints which are imposed if you think of information only in terms of the technology which delivers it. It also supports the perception of information as a distinct asset of an organisation which is just as fundamental as are its human, physical or financial resources.

Librarians have a crucial role in helping us to cope with these changes. It is the librarian who facilitates our use of the new technology and by enabling us to find, evaluate and utilise the information we need, it is the librarian who will save us from drowning in the ocean of information which threatens to overwhelm us. But it is also the librarian who is best placed to appreciate the limitations of the new technology such as the crudity and inefficiency of the techniques used for electronic searching of texts compared with the sophistication and intellectual value adding which characterises a good index created by a human being. And it is the librarian who without being a Luddite understands that books still have virtues which the new technology does not and probably never will have.

An appreciation of the ramifications of the use of the new technology also impinges upon your perception of your own profession. In an article written as part of a programme conducted by the American Library Association the author posed the question "Librarians or Technicians? Which Shall We Be?" In her answer she sounded a warning against regarding the librarian's job as solely an information retrieval specialist. "Librarians" she said "are more than processors of information. If we continue to focus on how to make machines work in our libraries, we fundamentally change the nature of what we do and we also become members of a different community. No longer are we allies of scholars; no longer are we active researchers ourselves into the substance of an academic discipline" with the result, she went on, students will begin "to think of us as merely the technicians who change the paper [in the computer printer] not the experts who will help them think through the substance of important questions."

But above all I see the mission of the modern librarian as being to continue to reinforce the fundamental principle that information is not knowledge. I know that you are all perfectly well aware of that distinction between information and knowledge but I think that it is a distinction that the majority of the users of modern information technology do not appreciate. We need to continually remind users of information that whilst all sorts of machines can create and process information there is only one machine which can create and process knowledge and that is the machine which is located in the human brain. Only human beings can create or gain knowledge; no machine can do so nor will any machine ever be able to do so. I sometimes think that we ought to impose a statutory obligation to print at the foot of every page of every data base the words "The Librarian General warns that information is not knowledge." But human beings are largely dependent on librarians to enable them to make that conversion. Being the custodian of one of the principal instruments by which information is converted into knowledge is probably the single most important role librarians fulfill in helping us to cope with the information revolution.

This will be a most valuable conference. It will keep you up to date with the latest thinking in all sorts of particular practical areas. And whilst you can do that by reading your journals it is always more satisfactory to hear what authors have to say in person and to have the opportunity of discussing things with them than it is to merely read what they have written.

Your programme also achieves an excellent balance between the specialised areas with which you are concerned and broader topics. And that is valuable because although specialisation is inevitable it is also important occasionally to step outside the boundaries of your own particular area and view the field globally.

I congratulate the organisers on putting together such an excellent programme and being able to attract such an impressive range of presenters.

I hope you have a stimulating, informative and enjoyable conference.

I have much pleasure in declaring the 8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians' Conference open.