IN DEPTH
Habituation or innovation? Internationalisation and inspiration
Former Associate Dean of the Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University, and Chair of the IFLA Professional Board, Professor Ian Johnson has been posting news and updates about the damage to cultural heritage in the Middle East. Largely focusing on Iraq and Syria and the eff ects of confl ict on libraries and archives. Here he asks whether librarians, and the services they run, are missing out by not paying more attention to the wider world and looking at the lessons that can be learned.
WHEN the editor suggested that I might write about my postings, it faced me with some diffi culty, not only in fi nding time to do so, but more so in thinking what to say that might be of wider interest.
He had suggested that I might write about culture heritage in confl ict zones. That and issues facing the book trade have been the theme of many of my re-posts, while others have been concerned with the publication on the web of new resources and issues related to freedom of information. I couldn’t claim to be an expert in any of these sub- jects, though collating information about the disaster in Iraq in 2003 and the misin- formation that was spread at the time did provoke me into a few suggestions about disaster information systems which seem to have been taken up by Unesco, although probably not solely at my suggestion.
Librarians’ fi xed mindsets? What I was doing seemed a little at odds with my resolve to disconnect from many email lists that I had felt obliged to follow when I was working. When I asked myself why I re-posted some information, I began to realise that what I was doing was a small and narrowly focused response to my long-standing concern that, as a profession, librarians are probably no better and no
50 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Professor Ian Johnson.
worse than others in being aware of potentially useful knowledge and techniques that are emerging, some in related fi elds, even in our own discipline in other sectors and especially in other countries.
A number of studies over the last few years have shown that few librarians keep up to date with research in the fi eld, even though it might have implications for professional policies or practices. A few studies have shown that, if they do, they are not inclined to look beyond the narrow sector in which they work, and that they show little interest in how practi- tioners in other disciplines address challenges similar to those that librarians face. It has seemed to me for some time that many librarians seek out only information
October-November 2019
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