Cqqc Engineering Social Change

cqqc – engineering social change article for the Diversity newsletter, 750 words February 2005 was called by Schools Out http://www.schools-out.org.uk/ lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered history month, and supported by the DfES, the Mayor for London, attracting a speech by the then MP, Steve Twigg. As part of the month, I had previously written a paper for Information and Social Change http://www.libr.org/ISC/articles/20-John_Lindsay.html in which I updated the material I had written in Libraries and Social Change thirty years ago. During the month I gave a talk to the London Socialist Historians’ Group called taking a kissybian for a walk during which I drew together some threads and illustrated them. This, together with a variety of other articles will be published in an issue of Information, systems, and social change in the course of this year. Thirty years ago when I took part in the launching of Gay Switchboard, I argued that what was needed was one telephone number which was so widely available that anyone who wanted it would be able to obtain it. That was

the central idea behind 837 7324 and I think it has worked. When I launched the gay librarians’ group with a letter in the Library Association Record I argued that professionals have an obligation to provide a positive image of respect for gay and lesbian users and have to change their professional practices accordingly. This I still assert. During the month I undertook a short and simple survey of some of the resources which might be open to people for I argued then and still argue that the public library is the first point of entry into the world of organised knowledge though now it is as much through the People’s Network as it will be through books on shelves or magazines. However the catalogue will remain along with stock selection a most important professional obligation. Studying four London public libraries, which perhaps I shouldn’t name, and looking at the clumps, M25 http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ and public libraries http://www.londonlibraries.org.uk/will/Categories.aspx gave me a very varied picture, I suppose predicatable. The British Library I studied in some depth to get a feel for what the national collection might look like. This is clearly more specialised than most people will want to follow but it seems to me as chair of the National Forum on Information

Planning that we must have a system, so there are simple first points of call, then more detailed followup facilities. These might be in public libraries, for example Westminister has an exemplary collection on art and design, or in universities, where again there is great diversity in the quality of the collections and in this area journals are in many ways more important than books. This meant I had to examine also the resources for which we don’t have a generic name, the databases and indexing, abstracting services. Also studied were museums, art galleries, bookshops, and the Internet. The Internet is the hard one for we have to distinguish between the services provided by organisations for example such as higher education through, again, for example, SOSIG, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ and be able to compare and contrast with the results on google (which I shan’t url, so there).