STRAIT to the future

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

Transcript of panel session
Thursday 26 August

Andie Smithies: Thank you for your patience ladies and gentlemen. At our panel session today, unfortunately two of our plenary speakers had to leave early so we don't have either Karen Coyle or Judith Siess. We do have Mickie Voges, Grace Cheng, Don Chalmers, Susan DiMattia and in addition John Levett, who chaired the first session, Mickie's session, has joined us and Kathy Saurine, who gave the Lesle Symes lecture has also joined our panel. The session will be facilitated by Janine Combes and I'd like to introduce you to Janine now and hand over to her.

Janine Combes: OK I'd like to welcome people to this session. The way that we thought we'd run this session is that we have a number of questions which have come through the conference, both from individuals and as a result of the focus sessions. So we have a list of those which we are going to ask our panel to address one after the other. We'd actually like it to be quite a relaxed discussion though, and I think we're going to have no trouble filling our hour, judging by what I've been told of the past few days. So what we thought we'd do is ask you to maybe stick to the current theme that we're on so if you have a question or a comment that you'd like to make feel free to move down to the microphones. If I don't see you standing there, wave at me, frantically. And if we have time we can move on to questions that aren't on our list, so there's hopefully a little bit of space for general questions. I've been asked to note that we've had quite a few questions so we may not have time to get through them all and in fact we've had some which are very specific and we thought would be more appropriately answered outside this forum. So we've tried to keep the questions fairly general and broad, hopefully involving and interesting and questions that sum up some of the main themes that have come through the conference. OK well maybe I should kick off at that point.

Do you agree that information has been hijacked as the province of computer operators who do not have a history of managing the content in the same way as have Dewey, MARC, KWIC etc? If so, is it equally important that we promote this aspect of our work among our clients who (thanks to the internet) regard free text searching as an adequate search tool for all occasions?
So I'm going to throw that one towards the panel and see who'd like to start the discussion.

Grace Cheng: It's easier to be first because then I will have something to say. If I understand this question correctly, as librarians I also have this feeling that the internet search engines place a lot of emphasis on free text searching. Based on the very fact that they are using artificial intelligence to a large extent to find information. So it seems that the librarian's work of categorising and putting intellectual content and organising the data into catalogues, this aspect of the work gets ignored because the search engines seem to have worked well. I think this impression is derived from a very important factor and that is the work of an indexer or a cataloguer has been very invisible. I think I agree with this question that we should promote this aspect of our work. One of the speakers said that you have to take doctoral research to find out that you need a controlled vocabulary and in medicine it is very true because the National Library of Medicine has been compiling a very good thesaurus and it turns out that by using this thesaurus we can do a lot of sophisticated searches to achieve high sensitivity and high specificity the way that the users want. Yes, I think it is very important that we should promote this aspect of our work by adding intellectual content, not so much by artificial intelligence but by librarian's intelligence as well.

Susan DiMattia: Well I could stay true to character and say "has information been hijacked"? only if we want it to be that way. It seems to me that, I know in the U.S. anyway, we've had an ongoing debate. Librarians have been almost paranoid about the IT, MIS segment of the organisation. Its just now beginning to become an area where there is some collaboration and where they are beginning to recognise that their expertise is not in the content end. Their expertise is in the pipes and our expertise is what we push through those pipes. So there is a collaborative possibility there and I think its up to us to make the connection and if we don't and if it gets hijacked as a prerogative I think we have only ourselves to blame.

John Levett: I listened to Grace's comments and I thought how little I really know about some aspects of our profession. You should never overestimate the depth of my ignorance. But it does seem to me that this question in itself, in its plaintiveness, is characteristic of much of the debate that we've had here at this conference. Its almost a cry for some kind of divine intervention that will fix the problem once and for all and that just doesn't happen, it doesn't happen at all in any aspect of anybody's work. I quoted in another context a history which I'm presently engaged with which is the official American history of the Second World War and at the moment I'm grappling with the issues that were faced when the Americans, the English, the French and the Poles landed on the shores of Europe on D-Day in June 1944. Now that particular event saw focused on a very, very small piece of the Earth's surface the most massive concentration of technology that the world had ever seen up to that point. Within four hours of the opening of the battle it had degenerated into a series of three or four man squads dealing with other three or four man squads. All the command structures, all the technology, all the training, all the principles had come down in the end to what the individual was doing. And in a sense it seems to me that what will happen here for our profession, both in the immediate and distant futures is what we as individuals do about it. And that's one aspect of us being professional. I think we each have to fight this particular skirmish in our own context and deal with the issues and capture the ground and it has to be done on an individual basis, case by case. I think the comments, and this relates to some of the other questions here which I guess we'll get to in time, in particular, the notion of creativity that Susan canvassed right at the outset. We are going the have to learn ways to solve these problems, individually on the ground in our own space and our own time.

Janine Combes:Before we move into creativity, any other comments from the floor about how we might go about this, the promotion of the role of librarians?

Kathy Saurine: I'd just like to invite Don to go and speak to my department please about the value of libraries. I'll do it as well, I don't mind being a little terrier, but I'd like some others as well.

Don Chalmers: I think that's a prompt isn't it?

Are "user pays" libraries a contradiction in terms?

Don Chalmers: I think its really quite interesting that this second question, it's always really effective when you've had a legal training, when you don't know the answer to one question you pretend the other one's much more important. And it still doesn't make sense. I think the idea of user pays, I don't know whether this is actually a sort of hark back to those wonderful halcyon times when we had these things called governments that did things for us, and that actually paid for education, health and welfare, the great three pillars of the last fifty years. I'm quite sure that I think user pays is here and we ought to start actually looking at it and that one of the things that could start happening I think in the Academy is that the National Health and Medical Research Council, which I sit on, or the ARC, these large funding bodies, they just start having a line, they actually have a line for library. But what usually that means is, library books, or a new dataset or somebody else's ruddy software. You never pay for the actual service time which, if anyone knows the use of my library, is really quite extensive. I've got a book, I'm not quite sure of the author, I can't remember the title, don't know where it was published and I've got a bit of a worry that it was published at all ... I can see some people nodding, yes, I'm the client from hell! The one that Mickie Voges says "he's coming, look he's there".
But I think that idea of user pays I suspect sadly, as a reflection, that the scholarly endeavour now is that if you actually pay for it and price yourself right, somehow people think you are a far more important professor than one who just goes around doing it for free. And I suspect that library services, it's not a bad thing to actually say ... we know that you can't actually do the things that you need to do without us, or if you're going to do it, I can probably save you at least ninety percent of your time because I've got the skills to do this far more quickly, effectively and what's really interesting, I can actually find things that you don't know about. I think back to some of the early work which I did in this biotechnology area. I didn't know about all the things that you could get out of European databases and so on, because as a lawyer, you've got this terrific idea that if its not in a statute or what a judge said it doesn't exist. And I suddenly found that there was all these other things around. So I actually think that this idea of user pays is actually one of the ways that I think the status of the profession simply says ... I'm sorry we're producing a service, we've got to be covered, and we're actually running in a declining budget and what we're actually trying to do usually is find more money for more datasets and more books, when we're actually producing the service which is actually the substrata for most of the research and the endeavour which is conducted in most major universities. I don't have to be sold. Was I good enough to you, did I pass the test?

Kathy Saurine: That was fine and you've really touched on my favourite hobby horse which is fee for service. You talked about governments passing things on, not running services, and I did some research in the health sector and within Tasmania, we've privatised some hospitals and one company will not pay or provide a library service and they expect to get it for free from the government service. And it was quite a battle and the staff in that hospital still have no library service. I'm very interested to see what's going to happen with the challenge of the Royal Hobart Hospital with a private company going in there, to see what happens.

Jane Treadwell (NZ): The philosophy of user pays is something me as a Kiwi mentions at Australian conferences fairly frequently. What we've done in New Zealand law firms is that the library service librarians charge their research time and by charging our research time, we changed the mindset of our partnerships and our CEO's and we're actually seen as fee earners and our firms' fee earners are valuable assets and that's how they now see us. And there's one large law firm in Auckland which actually funds two full-time law librarians' salaries out of the cost recovery element of their research services charged.

Don Chalmers: Could I just go on a little bit further and I suspect that like most of the major law firms around the world you've actually found that if some idiot like me is dabbling around in the internet I'm wasting my time. Stupidity is something which I can recognise pretty easily, and that you actually have a far more efficient process by actually saying that is a charge against. Its also an accountability process because we can see what the product is at the end and we can see how the charging goes through. Certainly I think in the law firms there's been a massive change. I think the Governor and the Chief Justice during the course of the some of the talks and I think some of the plenary speakers talked about it. But I've actually been part of watching that revolution and it comes to a point that its much more efficient for professionals to do it than the dabbling amateurs.

Mickie Voges: I want to add a voice to that because I've been fascinated by this discussion for years. Because there is a perception that there is a dichotomy here. I just simply don't think there is. The user always pays. Even when the user perceives there is no direct cost, the user is paying. Either in the user's time, from screwing around and not knowing what they're doing, or through their taxes, or through the rent for their building. The user always pays for information services. I don't think there is any such thing as free. In the same way that I suspect that none of you would accept a book that I hand you as a gift for your library and assume that it was free. There may have been no direct cost, but there is a significant cost to you to put that on the shelf. And you all know it. It's not free.

Janine Combes: Thank you. I guess my concern as one of the users of libraries from hell as well is if the cost is in direct proportion to the amount of time you take up of the librarians.

Grace Cheng: I'd like to add another dimension to this. My new title is Executive Manager, so I'm speaking like a manager, wearing another hat. The problem with managers is that you have to manage within limited resources. And there was one experiment that we did, about charging. We put charges on interlibrary loans for selective hospitals and for our own office, we give interlibrary loans for free. And the end result is that we got a whole lot of requests from our users and nobody else patronised the other hospital libraries. So if resources are free, if the users don't have to pay and if it appears that they don't have to pay, then there may be abuses to this. So, I agree with the fact that user pays is not a contradiction in terms, but it is just a matter of how you position yourself in the price continuum. You can charge users at a subsidy the users then will know of the value of the library.

Dorothy Shea (Tas): As librarians, do we have the responsibility to tell people using the internet that the search engines you're using are perhaps corrupted, in that they may sell placement, in that the results that you get may actually mean that somebody has paid to receive a higher listing on your results?

Don Chalmers: Yes.

Kathy Saurine: Dorothy, we've been doing a lot of training in Launceston General Hospital and also Burnie and in the other health libraries in the state with internet training and we definitely point that out. Its also, for people in the audience, its a very good place to get some revenue, with your training because we're better equipped to be doing the training than them using other companies outside your own agency which is happening all too often. So we should be really marketing our training and education role within the organisation. Its vital.

Don Chalmers: Could I just say now I find that when I go onto the net now either I'm really hopeless but the one thing I've found now is that its your bookmarks that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I've found something, bookmark and I can get back. I actually think some of the things in medicine aren't too bad as long as you can spell haemachromotosis, and you like to be able to trace through and find things. But certainly in some of the general searches which I want to conduct it is an absolute waste of time and that was exactly what I was trying to say. Its quicker to ask the library to conduct it and I think somebody has some responsibility. I do not believe that this idea of this fantastic world, the market will correct everything. I think we've ended up with things like globalisation. Most of the markets have been regulated. The Trade Practices Act is in fact market regulation so its absolutely naïve to say that we'll just leave this thing called the internet and let it just run wild and eventually the system will work it out. I think the internet shows that the big boys, some people might think they're bullies, called Gates will eventually dominate. They will use the market to their advantage. So if we're really going to keep this democratic freedoms and so on somebody is going to have to start putting the warnings across and I'm afraid it comes back to you people. As librarians. I can't imagine that there's another group that will have the professional experience and abilities to do that. And the fact is you've still got an organisation which most people don't think you're wearing buns, Mickie, I think most people still think you people are honest. And disinterested. And have a scholarly interest in passing on information to clients. So you're starting way ahead of trying to get regulators to come in and try to affect it. I don't think the market is going to solve itself. Somebody's going to have to come in and I hope do some constructive tinkering.

Lyn Carmichael (Vic): I've got a couple of things that sort of relate to this. One is the problem of John Levett's comment that we as individuals have to do things. The other the comment that we have a reputation for honesty. I think this overlooks the fact that a lot of specials libraries particularly are based in commercial organisations so we have a bit of a conflict of interest. I think we need some help in this, where we can't just be individuals and perhaps we do need the help of our associations to take some of this on board and do something as well. Where are our guidelines for how we behave to our organisation and where we relate to our profession and is our professional association going to give us any help in formulating guidelines and in putting these bigger issues to the bigger audiences that they need?

John Levett: It's a long while, and I was very pleased to hear the question. It's a long while since our profession has contemplated the notion of what its fundamental ethic ought to be and indeed most of us, or a lot of us, thought that our fundamental ethic has taken a fairly severe bashing when we opted for the notion of user pays. It may well be time, in an era of great complexity, for the professional body, or at least some members of it, to be contemplating some of these ethical issues. I think they impact as Don was telling us, they have the potential to impact across the whole range of human activities and if we are at the nexus, if we are the gatekeepers, if we are the portal, through which, both ways, vitally significant information is going to flow, then if we don't have some sort of ethical base, either on a personal level or on a professional level, I think we're going to continually be very, very, very uncomfortable about how we deal with those issues. And it may be time for the profession to re-examine this notion of a code of ethics and practice.

Don Chalmers: I'm conscious that I'm speaking far too much but, very quickly, I think there's a comparison between what we've just done nationally and I think most countries are doing about research. It is not something which can be legislated. Parliaments will end up making very politically based decisions. They really are showing themselves in a very limited fashion and very limited competence in passing what are standards. And if you watch the research it really has come down that there really are three levels. It's not the research ethics committees. Its certainly not my committee, the national committees which have popped up all around the world. It's the integrity of the researcher that you really have to start heading for. I see that as exactly the same thing. I don't think what John's saying is precluding the kind of support from a body which actually starts to enter into debate with its community. If you call yourself a profession, training is one part of it, special entry is another part of it, a defined job is another part of it, but singularly if you haven't got a defensible code of public ethics, which is actually saying how you actually handle your personal quandaries, and how you actually serve the public, public service, which, by the way and I'm probably not too good to the accountants, is the ultimate conundrum they have. They are not in the business of serving the public. They're totally client based and their code of ethics is essentially something which is a piece of window dressing to make them look good. The librarian, on the other hand, really is engaging with the public and some of the questions I think to which I've listened with great interest during the plenary sessions are things that we're really going to have to start working through. And then, once you've got the code of ethics, thinking about making a statement to the public, drawing up some guidelines of what is there. You, as a professional, not to be left out hanging because that's really one of the difficulties I think with organisations. Sometime you need the support to be able to go and say, its not me that's saying this, unfortunately there's an organisation which has a code of ethics and this is very awkward, which at least gives you some support.

Stephen Due (Vic): Just in relation to this issue of a code of ethics, many of you may not know but the Health Libraries Section actually has on its agenda the development of a code of ethics at the present time. This arose from a long drawn out but extremely interesting project in Victoria where the Victorian Branch of the Health Libraries Section, stimulated by some very good seminars, developed its own code of ethics, which we are now hoping to develop on a national basis. It has aroused a lot of interest and a lot of discussion so we will be continuing with that over the next year or so.

Janine Combes: Thank you. I might move us into the area of creativity as it was mentioned earlier and feels like a nice topic for the middle of the session.
One of the topics that came up during the Monday keynote address was the importance of creativity. So I'm going to fling this one to the panel. It's a big question about really the role of librarians in terms of creativity in relation to some of the issues that we've talked about. So I'm going to fling it into the pond and see who'd like to start the ball rolling.

Don Chalmers: Well I can't answer that, I'm a lawyer.

Mickie Voges: I don't think being a lawyer should preclude being able to speak. I've known some very creative arguments. I'd like to address that a little bit because on Monday Susan brought up some interesting points and I think that they are reflective of some studies that have been done. In the middle of the eighties there were a lot of cognitive learning style type studies that were being done and most of these always ended up saying there were four different kinds of learners. These were labelled in a variety of ways but there were several that really tracked each other although they used different labels and came down to the same conclusions. And those conclusions were substantially what Susan had mentioned on Monday morning's session and that is that we all start as what are called type four learners and type four learners are the ones who colour outside the lines, who colour in the strange colours. Type four learners are the kinds of learners who end up being creative, who end up being the artists, who end up being that segment of our population that is never quite drawn in to, quote, "the norm" and never gets so acclimated at school. Always has trouble at school. As we go through school we have a tendency to move from type four to type two, which is much more analytical, it is much more oriented to reading. A type two person and you all can think about this, in fact lawyers tend to be type two learners and the longer that they have studied, the more degrees you have, and the law sort of really pushes you this way, the more type two learner you are. You are the type of person who doesn't start anything until you read the directions. You line up all the little parts, make sure that they're all there and then you start and you go through and read the directions and put things together that way. Engineers tend to be type three, they're experiential. I actually am an experiential learner. I'm the kind of person who dumps all the pieces onto the floor, then starts putting them together and then when I have a few left over I try to figure out where they're supposed to go. But reading instructions, never. Type one learners are integrators, who look at the world through a very broad perspective and in fact in one exercise that I sat in, where a group of law faculty were studied, we all took these little tests and you all will be interested to note that I was the only librarian in the room. The facilitator plotted us on this graph and of course everybody was over on one side of the graph, and some people really far on one side of the graph and I kept coming up with these numbers that were way out of synch with everyone else in the room and this woman finally turned around to me and said "And what do you teach?" I just sort of turned red. Deans have a tendency to be type one learners. Now this is useful to us in everything that we do, in how we deal with people. But its also useful to us to understand the notion of creativity. Because those of us who have gone through the school system and been pushed into this type two style of learning have to look at what does this mean in how we analyse problems and how we deal with problems. And we sometimes have to take extreme measures, as Susan has pointed out, to try to get beyond that. To try not to fall into the same kind of analytical patterns that we've always fallen into. That we have been taught to fall into. We have to take some extreme measures to try to break out and look at things differently and have people around us force us into other mechanisms. One of the ways to do that is to associate with some of the other types. To find a type three learner. To find a type four learner. People who are in those categories. They can teach us a lot about how to think of things differently than the way we do. The other point that I want to make though, about creativity, that I think is critical because we really have to understand it, and I suspect that you would make this point too Susan, and that is that creativity comes with incredibly high risk. And one of the things that we have had educated out of us is risk. We are not risk takers. We are risk averse. We don't like to fail and we particularly don't like to be perceived to fail. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to get conference convenors to have a session on failed projects. I would love to know what it was that went wrong, how it is that I can learn from an experience, but nobody is willing to share a failed project. And so we lose that information. We lose that learning that we could do from that and we lose the benefit of it. There's a huge amount of risk to being creative and we have to understand that, going in. You can't do one without the other. And so some of us I think eschew creativity, not so much because we don't know how to do it or we don't have ideas, but we don't want to do what, I think it was Karen said, take that next step, and move that idea to action because that's where the risk is.

Kathy Saurine: I can tell you a funny story, Mickie, about a failure. When I arrived at Launceston General Hospital I decided the library needed re-vamping. And so, very energetically, we pulled down walls with the help of the carpenters, and moved the whole library with the help of my staff. We got good arm muscles after that. But in the middle of it all, we had a whole bay of shelving collapse on us and we were very lucky we didn't kill a couple of budding medicos. And we certainly made an impact. It wasn't to do with management. But it was a risk, we took it, it worked, we survived, and the CEO said "Well Kathy, we still are pleased you've arrived here."

Susan DiMattia: Yes, creativity is a risk. You risk being looked at as being different, or odd or outside the norm. Our son is inclined that way and I still remember when he came home from high school one day totally demoralised because he had said or done something in class and one of his classmates turned to him and said "Man, you're really weird" And he was very upset about this, so I had to work him through why in a way this was a challenge. For him to continue being who he is and what he wanted to be and bring this other guy along, rather than fall back to that kid's standard of what was acceptable. And so I guess what I would say is don't knock it until you've tried it, look at the positive side. It can be immensely exciting and satisfying and fun. And if you look around you and identify the people that you feel are the most creative and, as Mickie says, associate with them. That might help you feel the confidence and break out of the mould. I went to a lecture one time and I can't remember the guy's name, but he hasn't been around a long time. He did a lecture on "The whack up side your head" And the idea was that every time you start doing something the same old way you should just sort of give yourself a good swift smack. You know, snap out of it kid, there are other ways of thinking of this. And somebody said "Well how do I start, other than turn myself black and blue"? His suggestion was that for one solid week you should do three things. If you always write with a pen that has black ink, get yourself a different colour ink for every day of the week. So write in green and purple and yellow and red, because not only will it make you look at what you're writing in a different vein, but the people you're sending it to will say "Ah, this came from the library? Purple ink?" OK so that's number one. Number two, eat something different for lunch every day. Some of us are soup people, some of us are salad people, some of us have yoghurt every day. If that's what you are, and that's what you do, force yourself every day for five days to have something different. And then the final thing, if you walk to work, drive to work, take a train or whatever, vary the way that you do it. One day a week, I mean a different way every day in one week. And look around you and see what you notice. If you walk, you might say Oh there's a new restaurant on that corner, or look at that bird I've never seen that kind of bird in my neighbourhood before, or so an so's planted a new garden, what lovely pink flowers. Let yourself open your mind to what's around you. When I was finished this morning someone came up to me and said "I had forgotten to leave poetry in my life." And I told her that one of the twenty one people that past company magazine interviewed was a guy whose name I don't remember but he's the CEO of McKinsey and Company. And twice a year he brings together seven hundred McKinsey executives, if you can sort of imagine what that ..., talk about type one learners, I suspect, not creative folks. He ends each session by reading poetry to them. Because his feeling is that the way we are educated prepares us for a job, but it doesn't sustain life. And if we lose sight of the life that's behind the job, then we as people are lost. So try, I don't know, try what instead of soup. I have to admit I don't do it, I'm a soup and salad person. Try something new every week in other words.

Janine Combes: I just have to comment that a while ago I took up writing in green ink, which of course is associated with auditors, so you can imagine, very disconcerting for others.

Stephen Due: Can I just quickly throw in another concept into this discussion and that's the idea of an experiment. Because certainly in the field of medicine which is the field that I am predominantly dealing with every day, one of the things that you notice in the medical literature is there is a constant stream of reports of failures. Now that is an area where failure is valued. Failures are continually reported in the medical literature for their value to other people, so that other people can see well that's a path that we don't need to go down, we'll forget about that one. They are enormously important. I find that this is a useful sort of approach to bring into my own work. Not so much, I mean I know risks are important, but the idea of an experiment. I will try this and see if it works. If it doesn't work, too bad, you haven't lost anything, but just give it a go. Just conduct a little experiment. You don't have to totally re-do your entire operation but just try something. You know, if you want to introduce charges, try charging and see what happens. If people won't pay forget it. Try something else.

Grace Cheng: I'd like to add, about creativity. I've read something about the fact that creativity can be learned. I like the idea that we should publicise our failures. You can see, those who are in health libraries know, that medical literature is not full of failures. I also read about studies of medical literature, that because there is a certain publication bias in medical literature, because failures don't get reported. So I hope that as librarians we ought to be doing something in this aspect. Perhaps at the next conference, we should have a focus group on failures.

Don Chalmers: I just think professionally I'd really have to challenge the comment that medicine writes up its failures. That's actually one of the real problems, I think, with what Grace was talking about, about evidence-based medicine. For those that are unfamiliar with that term, its five categories of certitude about the quality of evidence. Top of the division one comes a multi-centre, international, randomized, multi-site trial. To run something like that, you're only talking about a drug company. And really we have actually entered this idea of evidence-based medicine with an admission that we may in fact be saying that the only evidence you're ever going to be able to get hold of is from multi-centre clinical trials and it descends all the way down to simple cohort study or level four expert. And one of the things which I think in this country is exactly the same as in other countries and is being approached by the European Council also, is that unfortunately most of the really good results are stuck in your top drawer. You don't publish them or you can't publish them through bias and its really one of the things which a large number of countries are trying to get hold of, clinical trials and notification systems that we can actually start tracing that through. Perhaps I've drawn too much of a criticism because certainly there is a culture which will in fact put it through but there's an awful lot of things that we do need to know about and we want to start tracing. In fact the NH&MRC is going to be actually starting a clinical trials process which requires registration and will get hold of the results irrespective of whether they're published.

Jill North (Tas): This isn't a question really, its just a comment relating to what Susan was saying about trying different things. And I've recently come across a book called A Passion for the Possible by Jean Houston and I really think its worth everyone reading. Because it takes us into trying those new things. Trying to break the old habits, looking at things in a different way, and there's one particular section of the book on creativity and how we can explore our senses and try and change the way we are. And I think that the other thing that we often do is that we surround ourselves by limits. We feel comfortable in a certain zone and we find it difficult to step outside of the limits. And I really think that there's a place in everyone's life for just exploring personal change and to see what effect that has when they bring that into every aspect of what they do, in every aspect of their life.

Janine Combes: Thank you for that. OK As we're moving towards the end of our time slot, I thought it might be important to tackle the question of what issues this conference should hand on to its successors. I know that by the end of today there'll be an organising committee here that's looking quite relieved and another organising committee that's looking less than relieved probably. So any suggestions, what are the issues that this conference should hand on to its successors?

Don Chalmers: This panel wants to hear from this gentleman at the front [member of the committee for 9th conference]

Janine Combes: Any members of the panel like to kick off this discussion, or from the floor for that matter?

Mickie Voges: Well I'll leap in. It strikes me that there are a couple of things that we've talked about today that might be good follow ups. Certainly the ethical issues. I think that associated with that has to do with the notion of ethics being very personal. What can we do for each other in support of an ethical stand that somebody has taken who is one of our colleagues. And I think that the notion of formalising mechanisms that allow us to show that level of support in those very trying circumstances are things that we could continue to discuss. I don't know if they'll want to do failures or not, but certainly it sounded like that was suggested. Another thing is the whole notion of creativity and perhaps this is a real wild twist but ... I don't know how many of you all go to conferences and run to sessions because you really are fearful somebody's going to say something that you don't know. And its sort of like, I'm going to this conference because I want to make sure that I really know what's going on and I don't want to take a chance. But you get into the session and you find that, my goodness, you have been keeping up with the professional literature, you have been reading all the things you're supposed to read, you have been surfing the net and finding the interesting sites and, by golly, you know what's going on. As well as the speaker, right? It might be an interesting thing to bring in speakers totally unrelated to your profession, in an effort to try to pull in some of this creativity. One of the things that I've found very useful in my career is to go to a professional meeting of something that has nothing to do with libraries, that I'm just interested in. And the interesting thing that has happened, for me anyway, is that as I'm sitting in the audience sometimes not knowing beans about what's being discussed ... I mean, I went to a co-citation analysis session and I sat there thinking, I know I did this in library school, but boy this didn't look anything like this. And the interesting thing to me was that I took that away and later on found a use for it, it integrated with things later on. And it may be interesting to bring in some speakers from related, but not library fields. It may be interesting to have a computer scientist here, it may be interesting to have some people in the substantive areas, that you all deal with, to bring you up to date with something that's going on in the substantive areas. I don't know how many of you all, for example attend law conferences, or attend medical conferences, in addition to the medical information conferences. That might be an alternative.

John Levett: I've got a couple of comments I want to make in relation to the next conference. It does seem to me that the code of ethics is a critical issue which needs to be addressed. Not just once, but continuously. It needs reviewing and updating and maybe that should be a theme of any future conference. Because my guess is that more and more of us, of you, are going to be faced with these issues and to have a context in which they could be shared and discussed and evaluated is probably quite critical. Related to the notion of creativity. We had a discussion yesterday, those of us who were involved with the conference, I'm not in the committee as I said at the outset, but I sat in on the conversation, about the focus groups. Some focus groups had a preliminary paper presentation, some did not and were unstructured. There was discussion about the difference in the attendance of delegates at the two types of sessions. They might have been much less comfortable about participating in groups where they had to expose themselves and as a consequence those focus groups without a preliminary paper were much lower in their attendance. And it seems to me that in terms of conference organisation, that might be an issue that you'd like to address. In relation to this creativity issue, but also a very critical issue I think for isolated individuals, the notion of how to identify and define your own professional autonomy in a competitive context. It seems to me that that's an issue which may be valuable to future generations. I'm sorry we haven't had a chance to talk about education for special librarians too, but that's something that might go on the agenda next time.

Susan DiMattia: My only concern with what John has just said is that you all would then be allowing yourselves to fall back into your comfort zone again. If you don't feel comfortable in a focus group expressing your opinions without the leadership of an initial paper, you haven't reached your level of personal discomfort. I would totally encourage you break out of whatever that is that's holding you back and not care what people think as you express your own opinions and feel a little uncomfortable about it.

John Levett: It seems to me that the synergy which occurs when five or six, even a very small group of people got together in the focus groups that I was fortunate enough to attend. The synergy which was generated by the three or four or five individuals there was remarkable and it seems to me that we need to harness this mode of operation in a much more effective way.

Janine Combes: Thanks John, I think we have a question or a comment from up the back

Jeanette Regan (ACT): I just wanted to say that I've attended a couple of astronomical librarians meetings and at those, they're only fairly small, usually about a hundred people, and we do have the publishers speaking. We do have the people that make the databases speaking, as well as the librarians, and the computer information people. And it makes it a very integrated whole to our subject area.

John Levett: Can I pick up on that because it seems to me that what future conferences might like to consider, and I've heard it discussed among members of the panel, is the possibility of inviting representatives of your client body.

Kathy Saurine: That's exactly what I was going to say John, I just think its such a shame that we didn't think to offer our administrators an invitation, or extend an invitation for them to come along to the plenary sessions. And if you could consider that for Melbourne I think it might be helpful.

Susan DiMattia: AALL does that very effectively, not at every conference. But I think its once every four years, they particularly have a programme that's geared to appeal to the administrators of the law libraries that the members belong to. And they have a massive outpouring of judges and all kinds of legal folks and its quite beneficial.

John Levett: I'd like to make a distinction between the managers of the corporate context and the clients of the library as they're not necessarily the same cohort.

Jane Treadwell (NZ): The 1998 NZLLG conference in Auckland we actually handed out Trade passes to lawyers, HR managers, practice managers and we had 190 of them come through the Trade Exhibition and sit in on some of the plenaries and they actually were blown away with what we were actually talking about and the quality of our plenary speakers so go for it.

Janine Combes: I think our time is up, thank you to the panel members