Catch the buzz

I’m no tekkie (I always feel slightly fraudulent in gatherings of colleagues who actually understand digital information management) but there’ve been several times in my career when I’ve found myself at the meeting point where ICT connects with LIS.

Show us your medals they say in football circles, so here we go: automating a college library’s issue and return system with the help of ‘A’ Level Computer Science students back in 1981; creating a database of educational resources for use in school and at home using Prestel back in 1983; doing consultancy for OCLC Europe (as was) in the mid 1980s; serving on the Board of BLCMP (Now Talis) in the mid 1990s; coordinating local (BLRDD-funded) and European (EU Telematics Framework funded) projects later in the 1990s; and now contributing to the work between CILIP and the British Computer Society to sort out the ‘who does what’ of information management.

And every time I get round to engaging with the ICT/LIS connection I get the same buzz I got back in the early 80s when that automated issue/return system worked in 1981; and when that Prestel-based online reference enquiry service we piloted worked in 1983.

I got the same buzz at the British Library yesterday when we marked the 30^th anniversary of UKOLN with celebration, reminiscence, and conversations about possible ICT/LIS futures.

I’ve always thought of former UKOLN Director, Lorcan Dempsey, as some sort of mind-expanding drug in human form and he did it again yesterday with his vision of OBLOW (One Big Library On the Web) as a potential destination website with huge gravitational pull which could remove much of the current and redundant duplication of effort across the LIS community.  Well, that got me thinking.  Let’s create the content (and the network) collaboratively and thus release resources which can be used for greater investment in access and mediation locally.  That’s a model worth investigating - particularly as we currently struggle to square the circle (especially in public libraries) between centralised efficiency and localised democratic accountability.