Meanwhile in West Germany…

Abstract

The effects of economic recession on the nationwide provision and development of library and information services has been the dominant theme for professional discussion and debate in the UK for the past decade. It would be wrong to suggest that policy makers, practitioners and researchers, any more than the end‐users of information services, have in any sense reconciled themselves to the inevitable frustrations, contractions and occasional contradictions forced on them by this state of affairs. Nonetheless, to an outsider it might just seem that the profession has, in some respects at least, displayed a remarkable capacity to adjust to prolonged tribulation. Perhaps one of the keenest ironies of this enforced siege mentality has been the fact that recession has been counterpointed by a veritable revolution in the technologies associated with information processing and handling. The silicon chip has invested the gloom of recession with any array of (at times) ambivalent possibilities for a profession which for more than a century has slowly, and of its own accord, refined an inherited corpus of traditions and functions. The transformations demanded by the new communication technologies have provided the library/information profession with a twin‐edged challenge: the need to react to financial pressures, and the need to understand the long‐term structural upheavals precipitated by the new technology. Adjustment, therefore, requires more than a set of graduated and gentlemanly responses; it requires far‐reaching, and often painful, changes in a long, undisturbed tradition of service and in the education processes and mechanisms associated with that service.

Citation

Cronin, B. (1983), "Meanwhile in West Germany…", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 35 No. 5, pp. 213-221. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb050884