Martina Flynn’s career as a librarian has taken her through a wide assortment of organisations, from schools and universities to the Railway Procurement Agency and the Law Society of Ireland. Electronic resources were always an important element of her work.
When the World Wide Web arrived, Martina was based at the University of Limerick, sourcing commercial and technical information for businesses in the midwest region. This placed her at the centre of a project to establish a national information resource on the web.
It was during the second year of my arts degree at UCD that I realised I wanted to be a librarian. But I knew I did not want to become a cataloguer. Neither of the postgraduate courses for librarians in Ireland appealed to me. I started looking further afield for a qualification that involved IT in libraries and chose a one-year course at the Polytechnic of North London. It had a section on building databases and another on online searches. The college arranged two one-month work placements. You could also concentrate on a specific type of library. I wanted to work in business libraries.
After I qualified, my first employer was one of the London-based organisations where I had gone for work experience. Roskill produced reports for the international metals and minerals industry. My job was to do research for its researchers. This was 1988, online databases were still hugely expensive and we had to pay transatlantic dial-up charges to access the ones we needed. I spent less than a year at Roskill, because I wanted to work in a bigger company.
My next move was to John Brown Engineering and Construction, which occupied a 16-storey office block in Paddington. The company worked on nuclear power plants, transport systems and defence projects, brokering deals that were worth millions. When I went for an interview there, however, I was told that no one in the company knew how to use the VAX computer it had just installed. My job would be a knowledge management role. The VAX ran Battelle’s Automated Search Information System (Basis). I had to get business information out of the sales and marketing men and keep updating the files in Basis.
In summer 1990 I started to look for work in Ireland. I learned that the University of Limerick (UL) was looking for a librarian. This was a job for a cataloguer, but I applied anyway. Then I got a phone call from the deputy librarian at UL, Marie Reddan, who suggested that I might be interested in a different role. They had an idea for a new type of information service.
Two weeks later I travelled to Limerick. First I was interviewed by a panel led by Patrick Kelly, UL’s director of information systems and services. Then I was invited to lunch to discuss the new concept in more detail. The Business and Technical Information Service (BTIS) would source and supply information for businesses in the midwest region. It would be based inside the university library and UL could provide funding for the first two years. But BTIS would need to operate on a commercial basis and to become self-financing.
I accepted this challenge. The deal breaker for me was that the university was willing to pay for me to receive further training in London. That would enable me to keep up my contacts there.
It was also important that I make new contacts within Ireland. I talked to people in Eolas, Córas Tráchtála, RTE, Irish Management Institute (IMI) and Shannon Development. I got to know the business associations in Limerick. This research showed what types of information were going to be required. I realised that different companies had very different needs. BTIS would have to be very specific about the information that we could deliver to them.
Most of it would come from online sources – market intelligence reports, patent records, technical specifications and Dun & Bradstreet’s global business databases. We spent a lot of time working on the concept and on a brochure that explained the variety of information we could access and how it was kept up to date. We launched BTIS in November 1991 with live demonstrations of our online service. The room in UL where we held this event was stuffed with people. Afterwards the Limerick Leader published a photograph of me pushing back a row of books – as if to say that I had found more powerful sources of information.
Within a year BTIS was making very good money.
This was a time when online searching was seen as something for academics rather than commercial organisations. Eolas was good at tracking down technical resources, but not so good at promoting its services. Other libraries simply did not know how to sell information. We were able to fill this gap inside our own region. Shannon Development was very good at connecting us with companies.
The European Commission, meanwhile, was trying to develop a Europe-wide information market through programmes like Impact and Telematique.
In summer 1991 UL sent me to a Commission-funded course in Metz – a introduction to emerging technologies and networks for librarians from ‘less favoured regions’ such as Ireland, Italy and Spain. This was followed by a session in Bologna presented by Pier Giacomo Sola, a specialist in information technology applications for education, training and culture. He showed how it was becoming possible for libraries with limited budgets to access and structure business information. Then he asked me to hold a seminar in Ireland on systems for smaller libraries. We ran it in the IMI.
Telematique got started in 1992. One of its flagship projects, Iris, set out to create a common online interface into five university library catalogues and Eolas. Pat Kelly wanted UL to lead this project, but the contract went to Trinity. There was a lot of resistance in some of the colleges to lending books to companies and Iris ended up as a system for sharing library resources within the academic community.
Eolas became interested in what BTIS was doing and brought us into the Impact programme. The agency was Impact’s awareness partner for Ireland, responsible for promoting electronic information services and related training activities. Eolas admitted that it needed help with this work and gave us half of the budget. In 1994 European Commission appointed BTIS officially as a national awareness partner.
By then we had seen the internet.
In 1993 UL information technology manager Gordon Young gave a talk about the internet. He was excited that it would provide wider e-mail reach and faster data transfer speeds. The university already had an e-mail service through HEAnet. The messages were still quite formal – you wrote them in the way that you would write a memo. Few commercial companies in our region, however, could be contacted by e-mail yet. That situation was about to change.
The coming of the World Wide Web changed the role of BTIS. By 1995 people in client companies were telling me that they were carrying out their own online searches for information. I argued that this work could be very time consuming and that it was more efficient to leave it to librarians. But the arrival of the web browser forced us to look for other activities.
My colleagues on the European programmes were asking themselves the same questions. In June 1996, after Impact had been superseded by the Info2000 programme, I attended a meeting of the national awareness partners. Axel Szauer, the deputy head of the Commission’s directorate for telecommunications and information services, was there. He used the event to announce plans for a new support network, Midas-Net, that would encourage the development and dissemination of multimedia content. I became co-ordinator of Midas-Net Ireland, which not only promoted multimedia adoption but also the early forms of e-commerce.
BTIS was also at the centre of an over-ambitious Irish project that tried to take advantage of the World Wide Web. The ‘national information server’ was Gordon Young’s baby. He understood that the internet was going to become much more than just a dial-up brochure service. He thought that there should be a first point of reference for anyone looking for information about Ireland. This web-based server could store government records, data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and a selection of material from the National Library. In 1995 the Higher Education Authority awarded a content management contract for the project to BTIS. HEAnet would be responsible for the technical aspects.
The project was hampered by a disconnect between the librarians, the IT people and the content providers. We did not have the right vocabulary for communication. HEAnet sometimes seemed to consider that their country cousins were not up to the same technical level as the Dublin crowd. And some people still thought that UL was not really a proper university. I could not get the guidance or support that the concept needed. Then the CSO and other government agencies said that they were not yet ready to provide information through the web.
I was caught in a difficult scenario and stepped out of the project in 1996. The national information server never materialised.
Midas-Net became my major activity instead. It ran from 1997 to 1999. By then Pat Kelly had retired from UL and the library had lost the drive and ambition and energy that was there when I joined. The European Commission was less active in online information services and my contacts there were moving on to other things.
I left Limerick in 2000 and moved to Dublin. There I was able to implement some of the content management ideas behind the national information server. I set up a centralised administration for a group of web sites run by different local enterprise boards. More recently I have worked in the Law Society and in a library service for postprimary students. I never became a cataloguer !
Last edit: March 2016
© Martina Flynn 2016