Accounting for information infrastructure as medium for organisational change

ABSTRACT

The last few decades have seen extensive changes in how organisations rely on Information Technology (IT) to account for key aspects of their operations. Understanding accounting as a process through which organisational reality is shaped, Information infrastructures (II) offers a means for analysing the role of IT in organisational change and how IT over time shapes how organisations account for what they are doing. We investigate changes to organisational II at the University of Sydney's Fisher Library from 1963 to 1975, following the introduction of manual automation systems, the use of mainframe computers, and the introduction of minicomputers into the fabric of the organisation. At Fisher Library, II changed two key functions for which the library is accountable for providing information: (1) what items does the library hold? and (2) where is a specific item when it is not on the shelf? We demonstrate that II becomes visible as a thing when it is of interest to organisational change, whereas over time, II sinks into the organisation, becoming a transparent medium that is nonetheless shaping organisational reality. This study uses Fritz Heider's theory of thing and medium to describe how over time IT changes an organisation's account for key aspects of its operation.

KEYWORDS:

• Heider
• information infrastructure
• information technology
• library
• organisational change
• media theory

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Greg Patmore, Mark Westcott, Robert Johnston, Diana Kingston, Carmel Maguire, Patricia Willard, and the staff from the Fisher Library Rare Books collection for their feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Fisher Library is housed in a purpose-built, nine-level building at the University’s main campus in Camperdown Sydney (Slight 1967).

2 Our historical account is based on archival resources that include the following: (1) the library publishes annual reports (ARL – Annual Report of the Librarian 1963–1975) outlining changes happening throughout different departments of the organisation. (2) The library also has detailed records on its day-to-day operations in the form of regular information bulletins (LIB – Library Information Bulletin 1963–1975). (3) Librarians published a number of articles on their automation efforts, where they describe various systems in detail, including their development and their operation (Bryan 1966a, 1966b, 1966c; Radford 1966; Radford and Barry 1966; Slight 1967; Schmidmaier 1975; McKendrick 1975).

3 For example, in 1962, 55,849 items were added to the library, which was described as a ‘slow down’ in collection building by the head librarian, put in place in order to cope with the ongoing indexing of new material as it arrived.

4 The number of loans made grew steadily over the following years to 212,516 in 1964; 282,648 loans in 1965; 325,539 in 1966; and 359,565 in 1967 (ARL 1967).

5 In the further course of this study, we refer to this card as the borrower card as it contained information about the patron borrowing an item as well as details about the item borrowed.

6 The process is called ‘punching’ as it creates small holes in the card at pre-defined spaces: The information normally punched into each card comprises: call number, date due, transaction number, and a code number to present the status of the borrower (staff, student or inter-library). In addition, cards for loans to members of the academic staff are punched with the borrower’s number (Radford and Barry 1966, 229).

7 Diana Kingston worked at Fisher Library from 1963 to 2004. Between 1974 and 1982, Kingston was the head of the Circulation department.

8 Radford and Barry (1966) calculated a total cost of 7 cents per loan transaction, which was reduced to 4.3 cents per loan transaction once collected fines were factored in.

9 The head librarian described the situation as ‘very difficult for readers […] to achieve satisfactory access’ (Bryan 1966c, 200).

10 ‘In 1966 a programme was devised to produce a print-out, arranged by staff number, of all such overdue loans. It was made a condition of issue of a 1967 stack pass that any academic staff member return or account for all items so recorded in his or her name’ (ARL 1967, 10).

11 The computer processing the data was an IBM 7040 system. As with many of the early mainframe computer systems, programming was undertaken in machine code directly manipulating registers processing data; hence, Dorothy Peake wrote programmes in the assembly code for the IBM 7040, called MAP 7040.

12 The name ‘Basser Centre’ stems from Adolph Basser, who donated £50,000 towards ‘Silliac’, the University’s first computer. It was based on the John von Neumann architecture of the ‘Illiac’ computer at the University of Illinois and was operational between 1956 and 1968 (Connell 1995, 265).

13 The IBM 1401–7040 installation was a dual computer system. This installation was common during the mainframe era as the IBM 1401 was used for handling the input and output of data processed by the IBM 7040. Using such an installation ensured effective use of the much more powerful IBM 7040 for processing data (Ceruzzi 2003).

14 COBOL (common business-oriented language) was a widely adopted computer programming language that allowed the writing of programmes in a way that was independent of the hardware architecture of a particular computer.

15 Data for both systems were structured differently, with data for the newer system including much more detail on each item. The older system, running at the Basser Computing Centre, also worked on a different character set and only supported uppercase letters. Conversion of data from one system to the other was considered ‘difficult’ and ‘more complicated than desirable’ (LIB 1973, No. 4, 4).

16 Loans made from the Fisher Library (Source ARL 1972 Appendix D): 1964 – 212,516; 1966 – 325,539; 1968 – 430,270; 1970 – 494,845.

17 The UG collection was picked because it was contributing the bulk of the loans made at the library and it had a simple loan structure with a fixed one-week loan duration and non-renewable loans (McKendrick 1975). Furthermore, a machine-readable record of the items held in the UG library already existed, going back to the creation of the printed UG catalogue in 1966.