TIME TO THINK—USE OF The SYSTEMS APPROACH TO The PROBLEMS OF The ‘ONE‐MAN’ INFORMATION UNIT

Abstract

One result of being a ‘small’ librarian has been that, although hired to provide a current awareness service and write reviews for a research staff, I must spend a proportion of my time in arranging for the buying, cataloguing, lending, borrowing and binding of books and other material. However, I do not see these two sorts of activity as separate in any way, but as both containing elements of two fundamentally different approaches to human effort, which I shall call the professional and the clerical. If I was entirely on my own, my professional hat would be worn when deciding what book to buy, what words to use as indexing labels, what ideas in a paper were relevant, what advantages a newly available reproduction process would have over the system in use in my library. My clerical hat would get an airing when I passed on a request for a book purchase, typed and filed the index cards, or arranged for a record of a loan to be made.

Citation

WHITEHALL, T. (1967), "TIME TO THINK—USE OF The SYSTEMS APPROACH TO The PROBLEMS OF The ‘ONE‐MAN’ INFORMATION UNIT", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 19 No. 12, pp. 406-415. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb050132