About the ReviewerThe Information Challenge: A Festschrift in Honour of Dr. Donald Wijasuriya.. Edited by Ch’ng Kim See. Kuala Lumpur: Knowledge Publishers, 1995. xxii, 272 p. ISBN not given. US$30.00.
Festschriften are awkward creatures to create and handle. When prepared in honour of a practitioner, they are often fraught with more problems than those encountered for academics, and the lateness in delivery of some contributions, and the consequent publication delays, seem often to be worse. The editor of Information Challenge must have experienced most of the frustrations which come with the task, but has managed nevertheless to produce a good example of the genre including some excellent contributions.
Donald Wijasuriya, who had previously been Deputy University Librarian at the University of Malaya Library in Kuala Lumpur, was first Deputy Director and then Director General of the National Library of Malaysia from 1972 to 1989, in which position he was largely responsible for charting the direction that institution should follow. Also active in the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians, CONSAL, and IFLA, he became known to a much wider group of professional colleagues. Coming from a part of the world which had not contributed significantly to the literature of librarianship before, the volume The barefoot librarian: Library developments in Southeast Asia with special reference to Malaysia, which he wrote jointly with Lim Huck–Tee and Radha Nadarajah (London: Bingley, 1955) was an inspiration to many who laboured in other parts of the developing world. The Information Challenge is another addition to library literature which is of much more than purely local interest.
Because of Donald Wijasuriya’s wide professional acquaintance, Ch’ng Kim See has secured a much wider range of essays than is common in such congratulatory volumes. The 18 essays include contributions from Australia, Botswana, Britain, Papua New Guinea, Sweden, and the United States, as well as Malaysia and some of its ASEAN neighbours. Most of those writing have followed the normal and pleasant convention of linking their papers to the recipient’s career or interests so that, for instance, D.H. Borchardt’s article on library publishing, Bjorn Tell’s study of national information policy in Malaysia, or Patricia Layzell–Ward’s thoughts on library education in the Indian Ocean region are clearly and specifically linked to Wijasuriya.
In some others, one must infer the links. Had I not known already that Wijasuriya and Hedwig Anuar had worked together in the University of Malaya Library, and that he had contributed to her festschrift in 1989,1 might have wondered about the relevance of her (interesting) study on publisher/librarian relations in Singapore. The late Peter Havard–Williams’ “Information and a New International Order: a View from Botswana” was unexpected. As its writer does not provide a link to the recipient, the piece seems out of place (though interesting in itself), until one learns elsewhere in the volume that Havard–Williams was Wijasuriya’s supervisor for his Ph.D at Loughborough.
Unexpected plums are one of the pleasures of festschriften. The Information Challenge contains one expected Plumbe: “Library Artefacts of 1959–1962,” by W. J. Plumbe. As the university librarian in Kuala Lumpur for whom Wijasuriya, Anuar, Lim Huck–Tee, and others worked in their earliest formative professional years, his voice from the past is especially valuable to remind us of the enormous strides taken by information service in Southeast Asia in the past 35 years. Plumbe’s hard work, not just for the University of Malaya but for the cause of a much wider library service, ended in personal disappointment, but was of crucial importance. His interesting essay casts light down the dark and largely forgotten blind alley of the Stripdex catalogue. Being a personal account necessarily based on hearsay for the period after his departure for West Africa, it also carries some serious errors — e.g., in his account of the time the late Fred Hutchings spent at Kuala Lumpur in library education, which was stimulating and rewarding for Hutchings and his students in ways Plumbe had no way of knowing.
All editors of festschriften have problems. Some of the essays in The Information Challenge show signs of having been written quite a long time before the volume’s appearance, but there was little Ch’ng Kim See could do to control that. Apart from the Foreword by the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, and the “Appreciation” contributed by Tan Sri Dato’ Alwi Jantan, formerly Director General of the National Archives of Malaysia, the essays are in alphabetical order by authors’ names, avoiding awkward questions of precedence. Ch’ng Kim See’s own “Donald Wijasuriya; a Personal Encounter” is one of the most vivid and lively essays in the book, and one to which future historians of library service will turn to get the flavour of library service in those days — and to understand what it was about Wijasuriya that inspired the affection of those who worked with him. Too modestly, she has included it not with the other essays in the book, but with the section of “Salutations,” letters from professional colleagues and friends who wished to honour Wijasuriya, but could not offer a paper.
Well–edited and produced, Information Challenge includes a select alphabetical list of some 60 of Wijasuriya’s many articles and other publications. I would have preferred this in chronological sequence, to illustrate the development of his own professional thought, but nonetheless it is a useful record of an outstanding librarian’s contribution. Unlike many festschriften, Information Challenge is a volume that will be frequently consulted. And Ch’ng Kim See is to be congratulated on its very professional editing.
Roderick Cave is Professor and Head of the Division of Information Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
© 1996 Roderick Cave.
Citation
Cave, Roderick, “Review of The Information Challenge: A Festschrift in Honour of Dr. Donald Wijasuriya, edited by Ch’ng Kim See. Kuala Lumpur,” Third World Libraries, Volume 6, Number 2 (Spring 1996).