Background to information policy: a brief historical introduction

John Crawford

Abstract:

This chapter introduces the text of the book as a whole by focusing on a range of historical issues which inform the text. These factors are found to be not merely of historical significance but to inform the contemporary debate as well. These include the nature of information and what it is, the uncertain role of government, the frequently poor relationship between information and governments and the move from information searching being seen as a specialist skill to an activity for all. Information literacy in a historical context has yet to be considered.

Key words

information policy

information literacy

information history

library history

library policy

The aim of this chapter is to undertake a brief historical overview of information issues with the aim of discovering whether a historical perspective can illuminate contemporary problems.

Information history (the history of information) is still a relatively young discipline but has attracted the interest of a number of scholars operating from different perspectives. A key question, not just for researchers in this area, but also for those concerned with information literacy, is the matter of definitions and what information history means to different stakeholders. Information history does not seek to define what information is and does not seem to identify a need to do so. Indeed, information history is viewed as a very varied activity and is considered to include topics as diverse as Roman Imperial foreign relations in late antiquity, Japan in the early modern period, political information in early modern Venice and the use of information during the California Gold Rush of 1849-51. Much attention however has centred round the consequences of socioeconomic and technological change since the late eighteenth century such as the developments in transport, communication, printing and literacy (Weller 2010).

Historical studies in information literacy seem to be unknown. An example of what might be undertaken could be the use of information by landowners and farmers to develop capitalistic agriculture in the eighteenth century. Overview evidence for this does exist in agricultural history sources although it has not been studied in detail. No studies of this generic type appear to have been undertaken by information historians at the time of writing (2013).

However, there seems to be general agreement that between 1700 and 1850, information, however defined, came of age. In the eighteenth century the encyclopaedia encapsulating knowledge appeared. Literary salons developed all over Europe where a wide range of topics were discussed. Accurate maps were produced reflecting a new culture of measurement. Scholarly societies and their publications appeared. (In fact, the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions had been appearing regularly since 1665.) In the nineteenth century the telegraph and telephone were developed and mechanical printing led to an expansion of the publishing industry. State-sponsored or funded 'memory institutions', museums, libraries and art galleries began to appear. In the first half of the twentieth century, these were supplemented by film, radio and television. Books, magazines, newspapers, records, tapes and photographs became the staple for the production and transmission of information. The emerging modern nation state became both a provider of information and an agent of surveillance, using such data-gathering and planning strategies as regular population censuses. The late nineteenth century was characterised by the growth of manual information systems and office technology. The need for the management of information was recognised by the development of new techniques like punched cards and microphotography which were mainly found in offices and specialised information services (Black et al. 2007: 11-29).

The so-called 'informationisation' of the late nineteenth century was further enhanced in the twentieth century by the active involvement of library and information services. In this process economic renewal and innovation were key themes. As early as 1901, L. Stanley Jast, the pioneering public librarian, argued for technical collections in public libraries and subsequently opened an information bureau in Croydon to supplement the traditional reference service. He identified two stakeholder groups, the industrial community for whom technical libraries should be provided and the business community for whom commercial libraries should be offered. Some of the large provincial public libraries, at this time, contained collections relevant to local economic activity - for example, mining in Wigan, textile manufacturing in Manchester, woollens in Rochdale and watch making in Clerkenwell, in London. However, it was the consequences of the First World War that generated major activity. It soon became apparent that Germany's technical superiority gave it a military advantage. It was therefore necessary for Britain to develop its scientific and technical infrastructure and information services to support it. Technical and commercial libraries appeared in Birmingham in 1915, in Glasgow, Northampton and Richmond upon Thames in 1916, in Lincoln, Coventry and Liverpool in 1917 and in Bradford, Leeds and Darlington in 1918, towns for the most part with a strong industrial base. More followed after the war in other industrial towns (Black 2007) of which the most remarkable for its efficient organisation was Sheffield. By 1924 there were 70 industrial collections in the UK. A promotional leaflet still survives from Leeds Commercial and Technical Library from 1920 which includes a drawing of a tradesman in overalls and cloth cap showing the practical nature of the service and at whom it was targeted (Black et al. 2009: 39).

While these initiatives originated within the profession, government intervention now became a major factor. In 1915 the British Government created the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) which promoted research associations: sectoral groupings of industrial firms which quickly adopted an information role. In 1919 the Ministry of Reconstruction decided that, in future, technical and commercial information services should be located within research associations and not in public libraries although the initiatives listed above show that this decision was widely ignored (Muddiman 2007:55-78). It is a rare example of direct government intervention in information activity.

However, other factors were at work. After the First World War professional discourse became focused on the agendas and interests of the general public. 'Cultural democratisation' through the promotion of quality reading became the principal 'Library' agenda and this became the main focus of activity for the Library Association. It was an agenda well suited to public libraries which dominated the management of the Library Association for much of the twentieth century. Library and information work came to be viewed as different activities which was to lead to a schism between librarianship and information science and to become particularly marked after the Second World War. The emergence of special libraries and information bureaux, as they were called at the time, was recognised in 1924 by the creation of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB), a voluntary organisation of corporate members whose primary concern was the organisation and documentation of scientific and technical information thus forming a strong link between information and science and technology which was to last for many decades. Such a strategy gave semiofficial status to information organisations while keeping the state at arm's length. After the Second World War there was a major debate within scientific circles as to whether scientific and technical publishing should be nationalised and centralised under a proposed British Publishing authority. However, the plan was abandoned as the British scientific establishment was anxious to remain independent of the state. This debate effectively ended the argument about state control of information. However, it did have one important consequence. The debate had been begun by J. D. Bernal, crystallographer and Marxist, who had unsuccessfully championed the centralisation of scientific and technical publishing. He also believed that documentation and communication were social rather than technological phenomena and that information science should recognise its social role (Muddiman 2003). The idea that the usage of information is essentially a phenomenon of social interaction is a recurring theme throughout this book.

By the 1960s no coherent set of people had emerged to take control of the qualitative development of information work and continuing dissatisfaction with this pluralist situation was signalled by the formation of a new information organisation, the Institute of Information Scientists. Founded in 1958, its members had a strong interest in developing and exploiting new methods of information retrieval such as Boolean operators and the relationship between relevance and retrieval. These have become the common coin of information skills training within information literacy. It was a time when information retrieval dominated the professional agenda. Between 1965 and 1985...