From fragmentation to coherence: Building an information professional community for all
Jinfo Blog

By Mark Field

Abstract

If you are concerned about why, in an information age, information professionals are largely marginalised, then Mark Field’s article will give you food for thought as he debates how info pros must work together to keep the profession relevant and appreciated in the 21^st Century.

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I recently revisited some old opinion pieces I had written for various journals back in the '90s. Apart from the cringe-worthy and naive pomposity, I was struck by how optimistic I was for at least one of the information professions: librarianship (here’s one example). Normally, I’d do what I usually do: stick it up on my Tumblr to be lampooned or ignored, and then return to my usual mytho-geographic musing-to-myself. This time, however, it was personally poignant because it was a stark contrast to the true history of the information professions that pushed me to publish the “Fragmentation” assertions on the CILIP Forum on LinkedIn.

In truth, even back when I earned my salary as an adviser to information professionals, I did not believe that there was sufficient clear blue water between librarians, records managers, archivists, information scientists and the, even then, growing variety of new information tribes. I used the “librarian” word a lot because I worked for what was the Library Association, even as it became CILIP, and that necessarily steered the advocacy work that the Association's advisers did. While much tribalism was insisted upon, even amongst librarians, who saw health librarians and law librarians as fixed communities, my own network tended to wander amongst the sectors and flavours of the profession. I respect those for whom their sector has become a core element of their professional identity, and sectoral information roles are real, but that respect is conditioned by a very real frustration at the tribalism that has become endemic to our industry.

There's nothing wrong with belonging to a tribe, unless it cooks and eats people, but professional tribalism elsewhere tends to be modified by an understanding of the wider professional context, whether it be in accountancy, engineering, architecture, medicine ... almost any other domain. And yet information professionals remain largely unaware of how far our domain extends and how it is shaped internally.

This is not a startlingly new analysis. It is old; hackneyed by frequent exchanges and endless revisiting, to the point where it almost prompts resentment at each new outing. It is like some monstrous doll that was once scary, but is now moth-eaten and frayed and contemptible, but we still shake it at each other every so often as if it's going to do some good.

But the central matter still remains: why, in the information age, are the information professions largely marginalised? Why can they not form a healthy, inclusive, self-aware professional caucus? Because that is the consensus, at least the consensus that I can detect: and I cannot detect a contrary hypothesis. I can detect the entirely expected consequences of that lack of fully self-conscious professional community. No one tells me that 30% of CIOs trained as librarians, or that information architects aren’t reinventing information science from scratch.

Maybe we should step back from those agitating questions, and ask a set of simpler questions: do the information professions have the standing and influence which reflects the value that we think we bring to the world? What does the world need in its information professionals? Does it need information professionals? If your answers to those questions are “no”, “I can tell you” and “yes” to those questions, then what?

There is no shortage of articulate accounts of the problem of professional community, the problem of communicating our value, and the problem of becoming a more needed profession. What we continue to be unable to do is act. Because we don't know who should be taking action, and what that action should be. I have an opinion, and it is to do with relevant professional representation and support, and where I would go to find that. It was the lack of good answers to these weary questions, and finding that there were sufficient people with strong opinions about where the answer to the key problem could be found, the problem of action, that prompted me to write the first “Fragmentation” piece.

Since then, we have held several promising meetings, we have begun to engage with professional associations, and continue to write about what we are doing. We, in this case, are Nicola Franklin, Conrad Taylor and me. (See Running Librarian’s Commentary on the DeFragmentation Meeting.)

“We” can continue to do our agitation, provide forums in which the “matter of the information professions” can be debated. What we cannot do is bring about significant change: that must come from an existing well-formed organisation, or an alliance of those, or from an emerging, self-aware community, which can find and organise resources.

And here’s the thing: everywhere we go, people tell us that “something needs to be done” to make everything good for our professional community. And there are volunteers,  people like us, and the level of discussion is as informed and intelligent as it was over a year ago, and the quality of analysis is also sound. But we struggle to have any impact. I don’t think we are alone. I have become aware of many small interest groups, individuals and networks that are agitating in pretty much the same direction as the “defragmentation” discussion. We have a number of professional associations who are not entirely unsympathetic to the concerns of the growing but largely disorganised hinterland of agitators, although I do sense a regrettable mutual wariness, perhaps worse. The point is: no one disagrees that for us, as a set of connected professional communities, something is wrong; that action needs to be taken; that our communities need some form of coherence, of advocacy at every level of society. And it needs a professional definition that is both comprehensive and hospitable, yet offers a clear identity for a diverse genus of practitioners.

And yet, a year on, as a decade ago, and decades before that, we remain unable to recognise our shared agenda even though its corpse will mock us, like that tattered doll, within a few years.

When I posed the Fragmentation questions on LinkedIn, I did so because I was worried and did not have the answers. I still don’t. The answers will not come unless there is a widespread desire to find answers, and enact them. Or we can just wait and see, but no one I know thinks that the wait and see will turn a future fantasy of widespread professional relevance into reality.

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