Professional education: Some reflections

It was a courageous decision to found a journal in the early 1980’s; and it was nothing less than a leap of faith to name a journal: Education for Information. The times were not auspicious: people were becoming less certain as to what ‘Education’ was; and it was often said of ‘Information’ that it told one more about the user of the term than it did about its intended objective correlative. Library and Information Science (LIS) schools had burgeoned forth in the 1960’s and 1970’s; but at the end of the latter decade there was strong feeling that, in the words of the old song, the party was over. Ten years before the founding of this journal the oil crisis had plunged the world into an inflationary period that was to last for another fifteen years. The United States and the United Kingdom were to experience the first wave of monetarism: that economic theory which posits that the whole of the economy can be controlled through control of the money supply – and that meant money for education at all levels. There was an accompanying change in the professional mindset of those who practised their skills in libraries and information services, and, with each new phase of cultural change, came a new set of ‘language games’. ‘Library Schools’ were changing their titles to reflect their wider interests. Some still favoured the action term: ‘Librarianship’ as more expressive of curriculum content. This form of nomenclature was said to help students when they were faced with that hardy annual of an exam question: ‘Librarianship is applied bibliography. Discuss’. There was a growing realisation that libraries were not alone in the universe of information. Indeed, from the other side of the galaxy (and the Atlantic ocean) publishers were producing heavyweight journals on Information Science, a subject that appeared to be heavily reductionist in method and was tetchily disdainful of any form of discourse from the Humanities or the Social Sciences. From Russia came the term ‘Bibliometrics’, which had an austerely rigorous denotation, and reminded the lessnumerate among us of the notice over the door of Plato’s Academy: ‘Let no one who cannot do mathematics enter these portals’. It will be noted that ‘Information Management’ and ‘Knowledge Management’ lay yet in the womb of time. There are many personal and intellectual movements that influenced LIS curricula in the period under review. In the 1950’s S.R. Ranganathan was the man most cited in textbooks on classification and subject heading theory. There is little doubt of his influence on bibliographic publications, such as the British Technology Index, and the British National Bibliography, largely through the work of E.J. Coates and A. Wells [1]. His own publications were forbidding in their (sometimes) cultivated mysticism – and an unnecessarily idiosyncratic terminology, which was an object of dread on the part of most students. Ranganathan’s own classification scheme was