In the preceding article, Nicola Franklin presented a good account of the main points made in the "Fragmentation Death" Linkedln group discussion thread and the meetings that arose from it. For my part, I'll focus on some definitional, philosophical and territorial issues that have cropped up in related discussions. I'll also attempt to characterize some of the "fragments" in this conversation: on the one hand, the two heavyweight institutes operating under royal charter, CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals) and BCS (the British Computer Society, formally known as BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT); on the other, some smaller groups that seem to operate more comfortably and knowledgeably in the new world of information and knowledge management, but don't have the same institutional clout.

I was one of the non-CILIP contributors to the "Fragmentation Death" discussion thread. I'm a writer, publication designer and multimedia producer, long interested in how computers can be used to create, manage and provide access to information resources. That's why, in the early 1990s, I joined BCS through membership in its Electronic Publishing Specialist Group. I also participate in the U.K. chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO-UK), the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange (NetlKX), and the Information Design Association.

On reading the first 75 contributions to the discussion thread, I found the term information professions to be undefined, but it appeared to connoie librarians, records managers, archivists and others who manage information resources. I think this artificially excludes people who work with information as creators, such as writers, designers and media producers. The discussion also seemed to ignore those who bring their skills in computing to the service of information creation and management. Even the call for defragmentation seemed, ironically, to erect new boundaries

Disruption by Technology

Overthe last three decades, digital technology has transformed the way information and cultural media are authored, published, managed, distributed, and accessed. The 1980s brought electronic publishing; the 1990s brought the Web; post-millennium, we have online multimedia, Web 2.0, collaboration, social media, and content management systems. How have these developments affected information work and the skill sets appropriate to it?

Compared to media folk, who embraced the new technologies with enthusiasm, librarians reacted ambivalently. Their training had focused on the management and classification, not of information itself, but of the media containers in which it was published - books, journals and, in the modern library, CDs, DVDs, and so on. Information was classified according to unchallengeable predefined schemes, and librarians viewed themselves as guides and gatekeepers.

The Internet culture of today, with its self-service approach to information discovery and skepticism about classification, disrupts this paradigm. Meanwhile, in public libraries, half the space looks like an Internet café, and the job of librarian isn't what it used to be.

But let me introduce what I'll call the modern information professional (MIP), the kind of person engaged in organizing and managing the information and knowledge resources that are the lifeblood of modern business and government. The work of MIPs is very different from that of traditional librarianship. The resources they manage are overwhelmingly digital and include databases as well as documents. For MIPs, information content is more important than the information container. They are unlikely to act as intermediaries, more likely to invent access mechanisms. They don't use Dewey; they create new business-focused taxonomies. And they are either comfortable with technology or work with specialists who are.

CILIP and the MIPs

These days, everyone seems to claim the taiismanic word information. We are told we live in an information age and an information society.

CILIP incorporated the word information at its birth in 2002, when the 125-year-old Library Association merged with the smaller Institute of Information Scientists. Recently, CILIP grabbed the K-word, too - the membership focus is now said to be on librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers. (Another buzzphrase is the knowledge and information domain, which appears no fewer than 61 times in the 2010 CILIP report Defining our Professional Future.}

So, is CILIP transforming into a natural home for the MIPs? Alas, many contributors to the Linkedln discussion thread suggested not. Several remarked that they had left the Library Association in the 1990s to join the Institute of Information Scientists, feeling that the latter organization was better focused on this new kind of information work. They were not pleased by the merger, especially when CILIP subsequently sidelined the information science perspective.

Meanwhile, the non-chartered, smaller, independent, U. K. -based groups and networks such as IRMS, ISKOUK, NetlKX and LIKE (the Library, Information & Knowledge Professionals' Exchange) are said to provide a more nourishing intellectual climate for the new style of information and knowledge managers and, with them, the inventors, scholars and consultants who are constructing the necessary tools, skill sets and theoretical underpinnings for advancing this kind of work. (Arguably, this is true also of some semi-autonomous CILlP special interest groups, suchas UKeIG and CLSIG.)

CILIP, which is undergoing financial difficulties, seems caught in a cleft stick. Many of its members are public sector librarians, whose livelihoods are currently under threat, so CILIP must defend them and reflect their concerns. But this mission comes at a cost - putting off efforts to engage with the concerns of MIPs. Perhaps CILIP can square the circle for now by building alliances, not only with the other librarians' groups but also with the smaller MIP-focused groups.

The IT Brigade: Interlopers, Plumbers or Allies?

Unlike CILIP1 BCS was not institutional Iy aware of the "Fragmentation Death" online discussion until I brought it to the attention of the organization's trustees. Nevertheless, the presence of BCS (and the IT profession) weighed uneasily on the conversation from an early stage.

Bear in mind that some information management experts resent the tendency of organizational leaders to misconstrue information and knowledge management projects as IT projects. This confusion probably occurs because bosses doni understand the information professional skills required for this sort of work but see a lot of money spent on the related computer systems. Whatever the reason, information management is increasingly seen (mistakenly) as an IT function and given to the wrong people to manage. Information management and knowledge management people can, therefore, be hostile toward IT people, regarding them as (at worst) interlopers who have eaten their lunch or (at best) as "digital plumbers" whose only role is to set up the infrastructure within which information and knowledge management projects operate.

I find these tensions and misunderstandings potentially very unhelpful. Fashioning a good IM or KM solution requires clear, integrated thinking plus tight collaboration between management, subject matter specialists, information specialists and computing technologists. Though projects can and often do fail for lack of such collaboration, there are plenty of positive case studies, too. One such example is the museum sector, whose management has a sound grasp of information as an asset. Another example is the U.K. government sector, where issues of freedom of information and data security have put the right kind of management in the driving seat.

Finding a Role for BCS

One of my persona! goals in this and other discussions is to bring my BCS colleagues into the conversation, and in the right way. This often means dealing with some BCS-CILIP history- it seems that twice in the last decade there have been "flirtations" between BCS and CÍLIP, which the latter interpreted as takeover bids and backed away from.

Throughout my involvement with BCS, I've sensed that, on the whole, the organization has a weak theoretical appreciation of the nature of information. BCS has spent most of its life focusing on engineering - machines, cables and application software - and has never quite adjusted to a world in which computers and networks are used primarily to access and share linguistic and cultural resources. I think this institutional blind spot has been magnified by the organization's recent membership drives, which have targeted business IT implementation staff.

On the other hand, BCS, like CILIP1 is host to special interest groups, and a dozen of these have a serious and wellinformed interest in how data, information and knowledge are managed using computer technology. In 2006, a group of us within BCS set up an informal discussion community called KIDMM (short for knowledge, information, data and metadata management) to explore these themes and bridge the gap between IP work - information management and knowledge management - and IT work.

A key component of a better understanding of how IP work interfaces with IT work must be an appreciation of the role of the "soft technologies" that are essential pieces of the modern toolkit for managing information and knowledge. These technologies range from markup languages like XML and HTML to character encoding schemes like UTF-8 to formal systems for knowledge organization and machine-assisted reasoning (such as OWL and SKOS and RDF) to the various standard file formats, search algorithms, and software systems that apply all of these to information resources.

More Theory, Please!

In reviewing the more than 190 contributions to the "Fragmentation Death" Unkedln discussion, I found that I am not alone in my desire for a theoretical underpinning for information work. One comment I valued particularly highly was contributed by Susan Myburgh, an academic and author of The New Information Professional (Chandos 2005). In supporting the call for an "information metacommunity," she insisted that it "must be predicated on a cohesive theory and view of the information world."

I've since been reading her 2008 doctoral thesis, Defining Information: The Site of Struggle, which expands on these ideas. In essence, she argues that without a shared philosophy of what information is, the roie it plays in society, and the kind of work information professionals do with it, we can't have a shared discourse on the parts we should each play in building a metacommunity of information professionals. She also believes the LIS sector has long been weak on theory. She quotes James Thompson, who, in his book Library Power (1974), declared the following:

The library profession must establish a philosophy or philosophies. It must cast off to a large extent the all-pervading emphasis on technical matters... From Dewey onwards we have had a succession of American experts on cataloguing, on library buildings, on storage methods, on circulation systems... This kind of 'professionalism' has its place, but it becomes absurd when it is employed in a philosophical vacuum...

I fear the shortcomings of library and information science that Thompson identified almost 40 years ago are becoming evident today in the IT profession. A mistake that both librarians and information technologists often make is to obsess about managing containers of information, be they books, e-journals, PDFs, or files within Sharepoint We need to equip ourselves with a philosophical framework that helps us pay closer attention to information content and its meaning in society, especially the role it plays in helping people acquire knowledge. To this end, I am investigating what Luciano Floridi's proposed Philosophy of Information may offer.

In her doctoral thesis, Myburgh suggests that the intellectual effort that unifies the field will be strenuous but worthwhile, that it will be "multi-paradigmatic" with a constructivist agenda, and that it should draw on such fields as semiotics, linguistics, cultural studies, and epistemology. The information professions, she suggests, will focus on information that (!) is in embedded or material form (physical or digital), (2) carries "knowledge that can be represented in a form that someone can understand," and (3) people voluntarily access to fulfill their personal, business, and societal ends.

In the context of ihe discussions Nicola Franklin describes, I firmly believe that part of the work should progress on this theoretical plane. The question of the IP/IT interface needs definition; the proposai for a manifesto also requires clarity in our thinking. As an independent worker, I shall be focusing on this part of the task while also helping build communication and collaboration platforms (a wiki at first, perhaps an online community later) where these ideas can be worked out con vi via I Iy.

Author affiliation:

CONRAD TAYLOR is an independent writer, graphic designer and media producer. He has been a BCS member since the early 1990s and has also pursued interests in information and knowledge management through activity in the ISKO-UK and NetlKX. He coordinates an e-mail discussion list on knowledge, information, data and metadata management and is publishing a series of Web essays and monographs at www.conradiator.com.