A special project of the Australian Library and Information Association

Information matters - and so do we!

Library and Information Week (LIW) is upon us again - and what a great opportunity it is for our profession to blow our trumpets and beat our drums. For surely, we have good reasons: innovative, knowledge-based societies depend on us facilitating the retrieval of information for research and innovation, education and training, government decision-making and business development, cultural pursuit and creative ideas - just to mention a few of our areas of influence. Never before has knowledge mattered so much.

Why is it, then, that we still need to blow and beat so publicly?

We all know that the internet, new communication technologies, government online strategies and electronic commerce are driving a massive change in the way the community seeks information and receives services. Effective information retrieval, ownership of information, and equitable access to and usage of information across social, economic, geographic and educational barriers have become key societal issues. As our political masters seek to develop the infrastructures to support the knowledge economy, and the associated new services, existing library and information services and structures can be somewhat overlooked. Yet we know that we are already providing some of those services, and we certainly have the expertise and capacity to expand or re-invent our services to meet new community needs.

So, we need to blow our trumpets - to celebrate and draw attention to our successes. Successes in the high-quality services we information experts are delivering, and delivering equitably from our knowledge-centres in the community, in workplaces, in research and educational institutions. And to celebrate the incredible reach and impact our services have. LIW2001, with its Information Rights Day, National Library Technicians Day, Libraries Online Day, National Simultaneous Storytime Day and Thank-you Day, provides us with ample opportunities and angles for showcasing all the great things that we are doing: our expertise, the value we add, our network, our safety nets. Not to mention all the fantastic things we would like to do.

But we need to beat the drums too - to raise the issues associated with the continued and equitable access to information by knowledge workers and information seekers - the society at large. We need to drum really loudly to spread the word about the threats to access in the online, global environment: copyright and payment barriers, censorship, filtering, authentication, risks to privacy, information literacy, the 'digital divide'.

We need to make our case and convince the community and politicians that wired, well-resourced libraries are critical for ensuring that Australians are well-positioned to take a leading role in the global economy of knowledge. What better occasion than Library and Information Week, with its broadened scope and critical themes, which can be picked up by all library and information services to profile yourselves and the information issues that matter to us and our community.

So, get out those trumpets and drums!

Jennefer Nicholson
Executive director