Visionary Leaders for Information

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Introduction

Where have we come from?

Although few of us were there at the time, it is most likely that from the first moment that human beings began to think, they simultaneously considered ways of managing their ideas and transmitting them to others in an orderly way. Certainly from the earliest times of written language there have been related thoughts about its management.

Stueart and Moran suggest that ‘as early as 3000 BC the Sumerians kept records on clay tablets’ (Stueart & Moran, in Sanders 2004, p.4). They were not alone. Pictorial symbols, carving or painting on stones or in caves, strong customs that regulate traditional storytelling; all these and their many variations were early manifestations of human attempts to organise knowledge.

Among the better known attempts at formal information management was development of the library at Alexandria (see figure 1). Similar repositories include those at Nineveh, Ugarit and Nippur. There is some evidence that at Nineveh, the library of Ashburbanpil actually included a classification system (Polastron 2007, pp.2-3). In China, libraries can be traced back to at least the Qin Dynasty (221BC-206BC) (Bodde 1986).

Figure 1 Inside the library at Alexandria, opened around the third century BC (reproduced under creative commons licence)

These early libraries or archives maintained a collection of physical records in some degree of orderliness for the use of government bureaucracies and selected scholars. With restrictions on materials, writing skills and the other factors of the times, those collections were necessarily finite and thus ‘manageable’.

To a large extent, this situation remained almost unchanged for the best part of two thousand years or more. Books were frequently chained to their shelves because of their value. One writer has suggested that in the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of around sixty books was ‘the medieval equivalent to owning a Ferrari, except with extra points for being cultured’ (Turner 2005, p.21).

Even despite the revolutionary aspects that surrounded the invention of the printing press, little changed as far as libraries were concerned. Essentially, it was more of the same. Items were physical, they could be housed within four walls so boundaries were seen clearly and managers could ‘manage’ accordingly. Planning took into account bigger buildings and more staff. This formula was a simple one and widely understood.

The Industrial Age that began after 1700 allowed an increasingly fixed and predictable management model that was autocratic and methodical. Assembly line thinking could be directly applied to item processing and, with every worker in their place and doing their own job, management could be highly organised and efficient.

Given the increase in the volume of material there were early attempts in several parts of the world to provide more rigorous classification systems – codes and practices that would improve the ease with which physical materials could be stored and then retrieved as required. One of the more influential systems was that developed by Melvil Dewey in 1876. There have been others, the Library of Congress Classification being among them.

For a significant time, library collections remained physical and finite. Well into the twentieth century it was possible for even major libraries such as the Library of Congress in the US and the British Library in the UK to consider it possible to maintain a physical collection of items in an orderly manner. The size of the collections had changed certainly, but new technologies allowed more convenient means of locating items in these larger collections and users came from a greater variety of classes, places and societies. Larger libraries and card catalogues were an almost universal expectation for the first half of the twentieth century.

In the eastern world, literacy had been a fact for many centuries. However, it was largely the right of the rich and important few rather than the common people. Public service examinations placed a high value on literacy and the competition for success was considerable. But access, generally, to literature was limited. Likewise in the western world reading and writing had been, during the middle ages, the privilege of the richer classes. Before that, they had been largely the prerogative of the clergy. Ordinary ‘workers’ who made up the majority of the population did not need these skills, it was argued, and so they remained distanced from literature.

This situation changed as industrialisation began to undo some of the traditional values. Mechanics Institutes, libraries in all but name, began the work of ‘educating’ the masses. Learning, particularly reading, became not only more common but more popular. General literacy considerably increased the number of potential users, reading was in demand, and thus libraries became common even in the smaller towns and villages.

The advent of personal computers in the later years of the twentieth century brought major change to both the storage of materials in library and the way those materials could be accessed. For the first time there were automated ways of dealing with searches and of controlling storage arrangements. Computers could search millions of items in milli-seconds. Searches that had previously taken years could be completed in a matter of moments. This was of course provided the data had been entered correctly and comprehensively in the first place. Data entry became one of the ‘new’ roles of library personnel and one more feature of library management.

This new digital development was accompanied a little later by the additional and related task of scanning and the growth of an outsourcing industry to provide these services offsite. All of these technologically driven changes took place over a rather limited time, becoming part of a new climate of change that was set to challenge traditional management models. For the first time, collections and their management began to move beyond the four walls of the traditional library. At the same time the work of library staff began to move beyond the handling of physical items and impinge on the worlds of the information technology and the corporate manager. Even in the smallest of school libraries, the library ‘person’ quickly became something of a computer guru in the eyes of many people (Lee & Winzenried 2009, p. 121).

Libraries like the modern one at Alexandria (figure 2), a distant cousin of the one that existed in 50BC, took on a new look but generally fulfilled the same functions in the same way. Instead of users having direct access to physical materials, computers offered a means not only of searching for items but often of viewing them as well. Thus the ‘modern’ library tended to assume the appearance of a computer laboratory rather than housing shelves of physical items. The change in terms of library appearance, the roles of its staff and the nature of its daily business was enormous.

Figure 2 The library at Alexandria today (reproduced under creative commons licence)

Hardly had these changes begun to effect library design and operation than the development of the internet brought further changes. Almost overnight it seemed an information user did not even need to move from their own chair at home. It was suddenly possible to view items in a library at the other side of the world. The internet brought with it a host of authoring tools that meant absolutely anyone from almost anywhere could now write what they liked and make it available. In order to search the quantities of information that were growing almost too rapidly to calculate, the construction of web search engines had to evolve exponentially. Quality control, however, seemed to become more and more impossible. Shirky’s (2008) book title says it all – ‘Here comes everybody’!

Within a very short period of time, the rise of mass media outlets such as Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter have become information (or misinformation) sources of absolutely massive proportions. The ease with which information can be circulated and the extent to which it can be circulated is the major ‘new’ feature of the present information landscape. With the best presses in the world, publishing and printing a book takes time. There are a finite number of copies in circulation and transporting them to the user can be a further constraint. No such limits affect Twitter and the like. Access an internet-connected computer and you have it. While internet access and computer ownership are not universal – they are quickly moving down that track. For the information manager, managing something that is self-perpetuating is in itself something of a ‘new’ and different concept. It provides rather formidable challenges. Again to cite Shirky (2008), it is akin to ‘organising without organisations’ and bordering on managing the unmanageable (and thus the title of his book).

What happens next?

Today, it is possible to see how almost every individual of almost any age can become immediately involved in the production and use of information for themselves in remarkable ways. Shirky speaks of the ‘here comes everybody’ situation and of the ‘power of organising without organisations’. Many of us can identify precisely with his concepts of the power of individuals within the information context (Shirky 2008, p.6), but what are the implications for future managers? Will they have any role at all?

Quite recently my own son was struck by a car on his way home from work. Fortunately the accident was not totally serious but his leg injury did cause some alarm. Early on the scene was his wife who, as any good wife would do, took a picture of the injury with her mobile phone and emailed it to her mother, an experienced casualty nurse. Mother, SMS-ed back a ‘don’t worry’ and pasted the picture on Facebook so that another medical friend of the family could double check that the wound was repairable. An hour or two later our son’s mother rang her brother 1000 kilometres away to give the news, only to be told that uncle had heard of the accident from his own son on the other side of the country who had seen the wound on Facebook some time earlier!

Not only had the news spread into unexpected realms but at lightning speed. ‘News’ had become old hardly before it had even become news. Information had been created, stored and retrieved more than 4000 kilometres distant without a single cataloguer or librarian being involved and within the space of a couple of hours. A number of ‘consultations’ had taken place on the basis of one photo shared around the