|
Year 2000: 30th
Birthday of EBSLG
A few memories
of
the European Business School Librarians' Group
European business
school libraries do not generally have a long history. They have often been
established immediately after the foundation of their parent institutions, but
substantial growth only started when major developments of the schools took
place in the mid-sixties. Since some librarians found out that their libraries
had much in common, they decided to meet in order to explore the possibilities
of co-operation.
So it happened
that thirteen librarians from ten business schools out of six countries (England,
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland) met at INSEAD in Fontainebleau
and decided 'to set up a co-operation between the members of the meeting' on
a rainy day in January 1970. A second meeting was held in Geneva that same year
and after that the librarians met annually at different schools with the host
chairing the meeting. The Group grew steadily and libraries from many other
European countries joined.
From the beginning
the librarians recognised independence and informality as an asset. It was also
agreed that it should be a working group; members should be active in contributing
to the meetings by means of submitting papers, co-operate in joint projects,
and initiate new group developments. Some of the founding fathers of the Group
like Genevieve Cuisset (Centre d' Enseignement Supérieur des Affaires, Jouy-en-Josas,
France), David Dews (Manchester Business School), Thérese Seiler (Centre d'Etudes
Industrielles, Geneva), and Ken Vernon (London Business School) have been very
active in this respect. Without their activities and enthusiasm the Group would
not have been established.
At the third meeting
(held in London, Summer 1971) the first joint project was started: A core list
of business periodicals. Many more joint projects followed and in later years
a lot of time was spent at annual meetings on discussing these projects.
At the fifth meeting,
in Manchester, the objectives of the European Business School Librarians' Group
were formulated:
1. To
improve the efficiency and effectiveness of European Business School Libraries
by providing a forum for the investigation and discussion of bibliographical
and related issues common to libraries of such schools.
2. To promote co-operation where possible, both as a group and between libraries
within the group, by exchanging information, providing for facilities for photo-copying
and loans and by keeping our libraries in touch with each other.
I joined the Group
at its sixth meeting in Delft (the Netherlands) where one of its main projects,
a Selective and Co-operative Index of Management Periodicals (SCIMP) was started.
From 1978 a whole day (often a Sunday) preceding the meeting was devoted to
'the SCIMP mafia' as Patience Hilton from Oxford (now Templeton College) once
called it.
But there have
been other projects, e.g. on library statistics, and I remember that we decided
on a project of updating an ILO bibliography over lunch at the eleventh meeting,
in Helsinki. In Manchester a Union List of Periodicals was produced (on the
School's computer!) and updated a few times. It included the periodical holdings
of many member libraries. The last Union List was produced in 1979.
By 1980 the meetings
had grown to a three-day event with often an overloaded programme with many
talks (by members, but also by guest speakers from the visiting schools), discussions
of different projects, visits to interesting organisations related to management,
a business meeting of the Group and of course the official dinner offered by
the visiting school. Sometimes we enjoyed ourselves by a bus trip along the
coast (Ireland) or visiting a museum like Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon.
It happened that we lost some of our members temporarily; Henri Broms (Helsinki
School of Economics) was always very good in getting lost. In Stratford he went
to a motor museum when we were looking at culture and in the neighbourhood of
Barcelona he lost the whole Group when the doors of a monastery closed behind
us, leaving him outside.
I remember that
I was always very tired after Group meetings, when I had listed to interesting
papers, walked a lot to see interesting things, and dealt with the progress
of joint projects. There was always much work to do just before and after meetings,
much of it in my own time. I thus was quite upset when one of my colleagues
asked me once when I had just returned from a meeting if my holidays had been
nice! The reports of meetings grew to the extent that the report of the twentieth
meeting, in 1988 in Oxford, has 76 pages!
I left the Group
with regret in 1991 because my job changed after a merger of the Interuniversity
Institute of Management in Delft and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. I decided
not to take part in the then established Rotterdam School of Management, but
to join the University Library where I did not deal anymore exclusively with
management literature, but became active with online co-ordination, library
research and public relations.
One of the main
advantages of being a member of the EBSLG has been for me that we had so much
in common that we could all benefit from joined projects, where we shared the
amount of work to be done. Second and as important is that we could learn from
one another. We met with the same problems (sometimes even literally) and by
working together we could improve services in our own libraries.
In 1986 I completed
a research study on the organisation of European business school libraries and
the services they supply (as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
award of Doctor of Philosophy at Loughborough University in England). It was
then that I realised the full potential and possibilities of international library
co-operation if all participants are willing to invest time and money into this
co-operation.
In general, projects
often do not get the results that were expected, because members of a project
are striving for benefits of their own. You have to invest to get results, results
for the project and only at the second place results for your own library. If
a project proceeds well, the results may be very beneficial for the participating
libraries. Many of our Group projects had that result.
As for myself,
my membership of the Group has been beneficial to my professional career. I
have many good memories from the years that I was a member of the Group and
I still am in touch now and then with some of its present and former members.
Bram
Oort
|
