In this and subsequent issues you will find a selection of articles drawn from the titles from MCB University Press Limited published in the field of Library and Information Management. You are free to read, download and circulate the articles, although normal copyright rules apply. But while there are certain common features of our profession that span national and regional boundaries, there are also unique local features and systems that must be respected if our library services are to meet the needs of our local constituencies. Localisation, however, is not so easy to uphold when faced with the global power of Microsoft, IBM or Ericsson.
Globalisation is powerful and seductive.
In my early career as a development studies librarian I frequently attended international and European meetings of information professionals and was often stunned by the sheer ignorance of supposedly educated and enlightened professionals from the Northern Hemisphere about what went on outside their own borders. This was particularly true of a certain breed of North American librarian, the loud-voiced, highly opinionated ones who were smugly insular and blissfully parochial. We in Britain, with our longer history of colonial involvement in Africa and Asia, were rather less parochial, in part because so many developing country librarians were being educated in our library schools. But the attitude was there nevertheless - we know what we are doing, we re doing it better than you are, and we can teach you a thing or two. Well, if we look as the infrastructure of our profession, particularly our professional bodies and professional literature, I am not convinced that we have.