Transcending widgets: the nature of technical services

This paper was presented as the keynote address at the Ohio Library Council, Technical Services Division conference,“Technical Services, 2003: Inspiration, Example, Synthesis” at Mohican State Park, Ohio, May 7, 2003. The keynote was to fill the role of “inspiration.” The author considers why technical services personnel may feel isolated, misunderstood, or dispensable; why technical services personnel may be misunderstood or underappreciated by others; the nature and mission of librarianship and how technical services relates to them; the consequences of having a bad image and a bad self-image; and how harmful opinions and actions might be countered.     

Audit, Assessment and Academic Autonomy

The current preoccupation in British higher education with quality assessment, quality assurance and the monitoring of academic standards is traceable to a set of government policies which constitute an agenda for the radical overhaul of the ideals by which higher education has operated in Britain hitherto. Intent on overturning the collegial ethos of British higher education, and determined to replace the notion of a self-justifying and self-regulating academic community with a system in which universities operate primarily as pan of the national wealth-creating process, the Conservative government has used the quality debate to impose upon the universities a culture of compliance with norms of its own choosing. The net result of this process has been a deliberate undermining of academic autonomy.