This article is from the June 2002 Issue of Update.
Philip Pothen is a good communicator — a good thing, as officially he's Communications Manager for the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) and one of its services, the Resource Discovery Network. The RDN is trying to get the web used in new ways in learning. 'It's well ahead of what the rest of the world is doing in this sphere,' he says. This makes working with Jisc very rewarding, and Philip's enthusiasm is palpable.
'I love the wonderful mix of things that the job requires. I get to meet a great number of people up and down the country. No two days are ever the same. Also, the possibilities that technology brings, both for our profession and within education, are enormous.'
Community librarianship
Enthusiasm for what he is doing has to an extent determined career strategy. Philip claims not to have had one, but to have been influenced by priorities at particular times in his life. His early career focused on community librarianship. Emphasis shifted to higher education, due to his research interests. Latterly it has revolved around the use of ICT in education, thanks to work with the Arts and Humanities Data Service, Jisc and the RDN.
But Philip wears another hat, perhaps less familiar to readers, as Chair of the Diversity Council. That interest comes, not because of his Asian background, but his experience as a new entrant to the profession.
'I began my library career in further education, first at Brixton (now Lambeth) College, then at the College of North East London, so my start within libraries was very much within the broad remit of community librarianship.' Philip returned to Brixton College to teach on an Access to Librarianship course. It was designed to enable would-be librarians from ethnic minorities who didn't have traditional qualifications like A Levels prepare for librarianship courses at university. The experience was an eye-opener. 'Here were people of the highest calibre who had had few opportunities to get into higher education, trying to find a route into a profession that was making things difficult for them. But they still wanted to become librarians.'
Profession missing out
Philip believes that the profession as a whole is still missing out. 'If you go to business or law schools around the country, you'll see a great diversity of aspiring business people and lawyers. I suspect that this isn't the case with many library schools and it needs tackling. The professional body can do a lot here, but we also need an organisation that represents the views of ethnic minority and other librarians who wish to become involved. We need to do this together and at various levels.'
Philip feels 'very strongly' about the barriers that there are 'in general' in the profession. 'It's not just in terms of a lack of progression for many ethnic minority staff, but a lack of recognition, training and perhaps leadership.' And if ever there was a time to tackle the problems, it is now. 'Libraries are vital to many current agendas — lifelong learning, widening participation, social inclusion, the question of e-learning and its place within the "democracy of learning and teaching" that Susan Eales talked about in the May Update. It seems to me that a profession that is called on to play such an important role will find it difficult to fulfil that role if it is unable to address the question of exclusion within its own ranks.'
This exclusion may not be conscious, but it is there, nevertheless, 'in our messages, our structures, our organisations (including, dare I say it, our professional organisation). The statistics reveal a great deal: 2.2 per cent of CILIP members are from Black and ethnic minorities (1.9 per cent among chartered members) and only three of these earn more than £27,000 in a professional body of 25,000 people. This is clearly appalling. There are professional bodies, institutions and organisations which have better records than this and yet have become the object of government attention. I suspect that if we were a more prominent profession, these figures would have come under scrutiny too. There is clearly a lot to be done, and not just in the area of race.'
Philip's determination to get something done has nothing to do with personal experience (he doesn't think his own career has been affected by discrimination), but is born out of personal conviction. 'I find it difficult to greet the general situation with indifference. The profession has a lot to offer the government's various agendas, and many others too. It knows a great deal about the legal and ethical issues surrounding equality and discrimination (even if it doesn't always want to do very much about them). But there is also a business case for implementing progressive policies in this area.'
Tackling discrimination
There have been some excellent initiatives to which he pays tribute: 'The Quality Leaders Project, piloted at Merton and Birmingham, is showing the way in this regard. It isn't just tackling the issue of career progression, but attempting to reach out to minority communities and improve services to them through its quality leaders. This model needs to be extended and to much wider fields.'
Philip's personal mission is to bring 'diversity' to the mainstream, to make it a central priority for the profession. His job dealing with the communities served by Jisc has provided some valuable experience, and the Diversity Council, a federation of organisations, has a democratic ethos, and lots of individual expertise on which he can draw. There are also many positive developments within the academic world (he cites the excellent work of Mary Heaney and her team at the University of Wolverhampton, and the involvement of the University of North London Management Research Centre in the Quality Leaders Project as examples). But there is much more to be done.
Clearly a man of many talents ('My academic background is in Philosophy; my PhD thesis was on Nietzsche and my book Nietzsche and the Fate of Art comes out in October'), Philip has strong interpersonal and negotiating skills too. He could have become an academic, or taken an altogether different path. But he wanted to become an information professional. Why? 'Primarily because of the huge variety of the work. We need to be educators, good at marketing, subject experts, technical people, speakers, writers, involved in strategy and its implementation, and sometimes all of them at once. The role of the information professional changes all the time.'
But it isn't just the challenge to Renaissance man that appeals. Technology drives Jisc business, but the 'people' issues behind the use of ICT in learning and teaching fire him up. 'People issues are more important and quite often more challenging and interesting too. This has been an important motivation in my career.'
(philip.pothen@kcl.ac.uk).