I am converting my 2006 dissertation into scholarly articles.

While this heft of a document is a reasonable starting point, I am amazed at how naive my ideas and writing style were, only three short years ago. One paragraph relates to another only tangentially. A single sentence is a graceless string of needless adjectives.

In 2006, I was confident in my ability to write a passable dissertation. Looking at it today, I cannot believe I got anywhere with it. The introduction is a poorly structured mish-mash of ideas, oftentimes resembling an action painting of research, random paraphrases blasted onto the canvas.

I puzzled for nights over how to reduce the word count to a tolerable 15,000. Today, I could Biro my way through the whole final product, easily taming it into a more graceful economy.

Hindsight can be both useful and humbling and it’s important that we remember this in libraries.

“The philosophy, objectives and role of the library have sometimes been discernible only in retrospect by the historian, endowed with the objectivity of distance”. – Luckham (1971)

It is incredible how our outlooks can change in such a short time. Change can be giddying, but through the identification of ever present principles, Library History can be our balustrade.