When ALISE issued a new strategic plan last week, one might have hoped it signaled a sign of life in one of the remaining LIS professional associations. A few years ago they spoke of a 100 year plan, but this time around it’s a little more modest, covering the years 2021-25, during which the group aims to become the global leader in the education of information professionals. Well, that’s no mean goal for largely American collective, but I suppose the rest of the world is used to such statements these days.
What was likely not expected, though it might reasonably have been given history, is that some of the association’s own members took issue with this and weren’t shy about raising their concerns in the JESSE discussion group. OK, people have a right to their opinions but I understand how frustrating it must be for the directors and plan writers to read the comments months after they had offered ongoing opportunities for members to engage in the process and provide input when it could have shaped the outcome. I think there’s a fundamental law of group behavior here — some people will only react, they will rarely create, no matter how many opportunities you give them. There’s another law which states that no matter the subject, some people will always bring it back to their personal hobby horse but that’s a different story which may or may not also apply here.
Nevertheless, I was somewhat bemused by the comments posted in reaction, many of which spoke earnestly and perhaps accurately about messaging that indicates ALISE caters to information professionals. You can imagine that some within ALISE do ask if the L-word is somehow being danced around in this strategic plan and wonder, with reason, if this is really the right way to proceed. Where were those voices earlier? Pick your excuse, from pandemic to procrastination, but they are certainly making themselves heard now.
For me, I am less bothered by what’s missing than what’s being claimed. ALISE is a small association, mainly made up of LIS-oriented faculty who are pretty comfortable the LIS view of the world which tends to put libraries at the center of many things informational, and believes accreditation will keep us all together. What some object too is the generalization of this to the broader world of information professions where libraries might actually be peripheral or worse.
I am sympathetic to the concerns but for quite different reasons. Firstly, I acknowledge the shitload of effort a volunteer group takes on to produce a strategic plan. I might note that most strategic plans contain enough bullshit that we could write them in our sleep and not risk saying anything new, but they still take some work. Thankless work. Unpaid work. You get the point. And the feedback they get for this work is usually negative, which I mention just in case you really did not get that point. Anyway, some good folks did this but I too find myself wondering if the effort is worth the result.
Here’s my issue. I now wonder if the term ‘information professional’ has served its purpose. Yes, it was a nice phrase in 2000 to describe an emerging interdisciplinary community who recognized that IT would change our world, and that if we valued humans, we would need to design and influence and shape and deliver these new information products and services for human benefit. We were fewer then. In the intervening decades, information has impacted everything. EVERYTHING. And our lives now are not lived in the way they were in 1990, never mind 1970. Consequently, every profession, every job, every human activity has an information layer associated with it or a technology that mediates it. There is no longer, in my view, a cluster of information professions that coalesce even loosely around a core set of principles, never mind a core set of methods, theories or findings. In such a world, there is little room for one association to claim to lead the many professionals who are wrestling with how to leverage and deliver information for their organizations, members, colleagues, citizens, selves etc. Information is so ubiquitous, so much part of the fabric of work and living, so much wrapped in technologies and in practices, that it’s become a generic property of routine professional practice for disciplines that have little awareness or even desire to know each other.
Information schools have already wrestled with how to engage the L folks, the IA folks, the UX and HCI folks, the design folks, and more. Each school has it’s own approach and where there is collective action, the iSchool Caucus has attempted to provide a form of professional community infrastructure without ever admitting it is like any other association, though the clues lie in the actions more than the statements. Add in ASIST, a mix of scholarly and professional members who seek to advance information science as a discipline and field of practice, and you have, with ALISE, three groups all representing a lot of shared territory. One might ask which of these three should or could lead and why are we even asking this question in 2020? The reality is, none of them, do, will, or even can!
Information professions such as Info Architecture barely acknowledge the presence of any of these groups in their lives, and anyway, they have their own group. Ditto competitive intelligence, knowledge management, HCI, UX, special libraries, archives, museums, and any of the other closely related to LIS groups of ‘info professionals’. Add in the data science community, the health informatics, CSCW, IT and work, ICT, Ed Tech, and so on and so on, groups of professionals who cluster around particular problems spaces all mediated by IT, and you can start to appreciate that ‘information professionals’, as a general term, covers such a range of people and practices that leading them is impossible and perhaps not even desirable. Many, likely most, of the members of some of these communities have never heard of ALISE, or LIS, or even the iSchools, and they certainly don’t want to be led by such groups. Do we deny them the status of being ‘information professionals’ then? Well we can try, but to so means defining info pro in a much more constrained way. And even if we could do that, we’d still have to argue about the boundaries like it was 1984 all over again.
I fear, therefore, that it is pointless now to even call someone an information professional unless they want to be called it. And even then, most people in the world would still not understand what it meant without resorting to referents that made sense to them…’oh, you mean a librarian..a stockbroker, a journalist, a mathematician…etc’. All to say, whatever information is, it is not, to most people, a profession.
So what then should ALISE do? Not my call but I would generally recommend that if one group wishes to lead, they need to understand who they and leading and who the competitors for leadership are. In the LIS space, which is really quite small, all things considered, ALISE might want to differentiate itself from ASIST and the iSchools caucus. It can do that either by providing something that is different, or something that is better. When ALISE speaks of being a leader of the information professions, I see neither difference nor improvement over anything the other two provide. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.