Understanding Mr Jellicoe

In my last column I wandered around the organisation and structure of the web and the use of Belgians. This month I’m going to get really dangerous.

I’ve often wondered what Mr Jellicoe would have made of the networked world. His real name is not Mr Jellicoe, but in order to avoid litigation I have changed his name from Jeffrey Bramble. Anyway, Mr Jellicoe was a denizen of the public library in which I worked many years ago: he was one of that small group of people who provide librarians with decent drinking stories, and to whom we are always grateful because otherwise we would actually be as dull as everyone supposes.

Mr Jellicoe wore a bowler hat, the striped trousers known as ‘washbag’ that were once the uniform of the British Civil Service, a dinner jacket, a string vest underneath, and good quality wellington boots upon his feet.

Mr Jellicoe was interested in modern military weapons; in fact, he designed them. He came to me for help in placing his destructive inventions – mostly torpedoes, as I recall. As a young and very committed librarian, I, of course, bent every effort to help him. Together we went through the well-known arms manufacturers, any relevant British government department and a few obscure organisations, that might sponsor his work. One sad day, I gave Mr Jellicoe a few numbers at the American Embassy, and then we were done. I could find no more potential adopters of his technology.

Moving on from Mr Jellicoe, it’s not just 12 or 72-year-old web tyros who just throw hopeful handfuls of words into sexy web forms. If you just chuck weapon-related words and funding-related words at Google, while you can have a good old laugh at what comes out, there are some very odd hits to be had, which are dangerously credible. I have mentioned my perverted love for technology-based information-management systems before now, but I have spent too long watching intelligent people, including scientists, journalists, architects, doctors, nurses, surveyors, and engineers basing high-risk decisions on information as reliable as that you’d get in the TV lounge of the institution to which Mr Jellicoe returned at 5pm every day, to believe in unmediated techno panaceas.

Now, I am a dyed-in-the-wool corporate librarian, but I have to concede that public libraries have an advantage over corporate libraries, or indeed any corporate information provider: the law says they must provide trained people to help you find stuff. Even when I was a twenty-something-year-old librarian in his first professional post, and knew nothing, I spent time getting to know Mr Jellicoe, what he really wanted, he and all his chums. He got better at finding stuff for himself, and I never sent him off to get funding from CND.

Trained people: let’s think of them as the 21st century Wetware Information Systems Solution. It sounds better than ‘librarian’ to the hard-nosed corporates who run most large organisations.

All joking aside, you really should get a truly forensic, independent total-cost-of-ownership done on your big enterprise-information solution, and then look at the cost of a few librarians. Think of Enron, think of Barings… we’re cheap.

Mark Field is group leader of library services, Dstl Knowledge Services (part of the Ministry of Defence). The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of Dstl Knowledge Services.