Librarianship and Information Work Worldwide 1996/97: : An Annual Survey

Citation

Calvert, P. (1998), "Librarianship and Information Work Worldwide 1996/97: : An Annual Survey", Asian Libraries, Vol. 7 No. 12, pp. 438-439. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1998.7.12.438.5

This is the sixth volume of the increasingly acclaimed Librarianship and Information Work Worldwide and the last with which John Feather of Loughborough University will be associated. He and the other members of the editorial team have helped establish this title as one that serious readers of the LIS literature look forward to each year. Previous volumes had only one year in the title, but we are told the double year will become the norm from here on, though this volume still covers material mostly published in 1995. As in previous years there are chapters on public, academic and national libraries. For this volume there are chapters on business libraries and children’s and school libraries. Additional subjects covered for this year are audiovisual media, electronic media, private sector information work and quality management. Last but not least, the topic of libraries and librarianship in anglophone Africa in the 1990s has a chapter to itself. My personal favourite among the chapters is that on quality management, by Margaret Kinnell. She covers the whole gamut of topics: total quality management, business process re‐engineering, quality systems, performance measurement, benchmarking and customer satisfaction, yet identifies common themes between them all.

Recurring trends throughout the volume are now well rehearsed: declining library budgets and rising prices of books and journals, steadily increasing customer expectations, the need for greater accountability to stakeholders, and the impact of rapid changes in technology. The latter comes in a variety of guises, but the greatest impact is identified as coming from the World Wide Web. In 1995 library managers were confronting the problem of providing public access to this vast information resource, yet finding it full of uncensored and unfiltered documents unlike anything they had previously encountered. For most of the authors the response is of a “let’s get on and do it” kind, though it is strange to see some writers from northern Europe predicting that libraries will ultimately lose the battle against competition from electronic resources provided by other organisations.

One major reason for using volumes from this series is the long list of references that follow each chapter. These may not be comprehensive or worldwide bibliographies, but they are fairly close to it and very well selected. The writers show their origins by the range of journal titles in their lists of references, and it is a sad reflection of the perceived state of Asian librarianship that so few of our own journals or authors have dented Western dominance. At the least, however, this series provides a welcome antidote to the rather blinkered approach of US editors who cannot seem to recognise any LIS expertise elsewhere.

Paul Sturges, also of Loughborough University, and a member of the Asian Libraries Editorial Advisory Board, will succeed John Feather as editor. We wish him good luck and look forward to many more useful volumes in this series. This is a necessary purchase for all libraries providing support to LIS programmes or in‐house staff development.