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B.D.C.(U) Ltd. Religious Investigation Paradigm Study Paper.

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

Walter Cronkite.

Is it not a noble time for Buddhist persons to strengthen their good will and help each other develop a further increase in English language translations, commentaries, journals, newsletters, radio broadcasts, television and Buddha Dhamma information for the super highway?

Our mission is to utilise present global forces to cause our Buddha Dhamma library to stay serviceable for 500 years.

1.0 Methodology for articulating strategic planning and strategic performance of Buddha Dhamma Libraries.

In balance, we think it is prudent to articulate our strategic plan to a large and unconvinced audience; even if a few of our non-friends denigrate our motives by following the fashion of joining nihilism theory with critical literary theory.

The first part of this study paper attempts to create a listening space for the discussion of issues which are going to have impact on many persons within our organisation and end-users outside our organisation.

Steve Bright of Catalyst Communications (1998) suggested organisational literature could be used in narrative form as a strategic planning tool.

Donald Polkinghorne (1988) suggested narrative expression is a form of " meaning making" that can serve as a lens through which apparently independent and disconnected elements of existence are seen as related parts of a whole.

The general intention of the first part of this study paper is to use some narrative form to familiarise our Members and the general public who should become the end-users of our cultural information.

We hope you find the narrative of "the way we do things around here" interesting.
We provide an organised background to deliver value to end-users of our library in the form of products and services, while, at the same time, we produce value to each of our individual Members so engaged.

Taken together, these two kinds of value, when expressed as functions, constitute our core values that can be mapped into operations to give some discipline paradigms in our Buddha Dhamma library.

Our important operations must be prioritised to meet deadlines.

Because we are able to review and renew our organisation's identity and opportunities we create new possibilities for growth.

Although we have set up fixed predictable tasks for much of the maintenance of Teachings and allow time for task units to gather for their current action research cycles, some of our activities have a large number of variables and present us with multiple conflicting objectives.

Because some stakeholders try to develop measures more meaningful to their concerns, we have to focus not only on strategic planning but also, more and more, on strategic performance.

Because of our vision, there is no such thing as a standard week.

On one evening all our Members gather to parcel and address our Review.

On another day, at short notice, we arrange for transport, accommodation and dana (offering food) for five overseas Monks who arrive in Melbourne from India.

To generate a new library resource, they are filmed as they pay respect to the images in our Assembly Hall, liberate fish into our Quan Yin pond, and chant long life blessings in front of our Padmasambhava Image in the west of the heavenly Dhamma garden of our Centre.

At the same time, other Members greet visitors from a Sydney Dhamma Centre and supply them with publications and make them welcome.

One Member helps an unhealthy woman feel better.

That evening, while some Members attend to the Monks, others improve the computer systems, while others write Dhamma papers.

Over many years, we have developed our own body of knowledge and practice which enables us to express the twin values from two viewpoints which can be expressed as growth or as emergent possibilities for action.

The Santa Fe Center for Emergent Strategies' theory of business action (1998) models two major ongoing processes.

The first comprises instrumental processes involving production of desired outcomes that usually occur against the background of prevailing technology, knowledge and methodologies.

The second is an entrepreneurial process of evolving interactions between the supply chain and customer worlds against the background of history, or what the shared world and this business are in the process of becoming. The form is change (Pali: anicca).

Over time, the production and delivery of goods and services changes the insight available, and then the background practices of our Members and end-users begin to change.

Things formerly unknown become known at the individual level.

These insight outcomes reshape the environment in which our organisation operates.

Insight outcomes complete the complex adaptive system cycle and we begin again to deliver the next level of insight for the individual.

2.0 Methodology of alignment of our human resources

The replacement value of the direct physical resources owned by our organisation is half a million dollars.

The replacement value of the human resources of our Members and Friends is estimated at $20 million.

Many of our Members are graduates and some have second degrees, for example, MBA (Master of Business Administration), and MAJIT (Master of Arts in Japanese Interpreting and Translation).

Their skills, apart from being essential for library operating, reporting and planning tasks, also cover occupational health and safety (OHS), finance, and environment support policies.

Their capability to produce suitable instructions for new Members and new end-users for their next-after-next teaching material will depend on the data warehouse contents. End-users must come to appreciate that if they rely on the completeness of the content of our library and data warehouse, they themselves must provide additional content for our data warehouse on a continuing basis.

The era of training and teaching is now in decline. The new strategy focuses on self-directed, work-centred and organisation-supported learning, and includes a requirement for systems science competency models for every individual, team, department and business unit with excellent cross- functional comparability, in-depth knowledge assessment, behaviourally anchored skills analysis, position-profiles, self-assessment, gap analysis, a skills development process and a personal and organisation value analysis.

Our capacity to clarify behaviours, successes, and problems and organise generative interactions with beings in our spheres of influence must be conserved.

From a narrative point of view, the undiscussible can be made overt and easily discussed and the organisational environment as a multi-layered entity can be apprehended as nested systemic constructs.

We need to shift to model-driven rather than rule-driven behaviour to find a lead to more autonomy in solving problems.

From time to time, we must stop being busy and request commentary on the nature of wisdom from our antecedent and living Masters.

Above all, it is hoped this study paper makes it clear to our past, present and future facilitators the need to make merit every day.

We make decisions in the context of where we are going - which is to use our lives to generate causes for creating new possibilities of growth for the propagation of Buddha Dhamma.

Hopefully this study paper will not be viewed as manipulative, but rather as a step towards investigation and understanding why we have behaviours and directives across our organisation.

We wish Members use this version of our study paper to refine our attempts to model the future of our organisation.

Inescapably, we must talk about our audience for this study paper.

We would prefer this study paper's audience to be our Members and Friends.

However, as our e-library policies state that our information bases are to become more and more readable, the distinction between internal and external communication papers becomes blurred.

We are aware that the act of describing the organisation's strategic intent in a narrative framework has risks.

Critical literary theory is based on the premise of using a wide variety of lenses to view the same artefact. The observer's choice of lens determines what he or she will see in a given book.

Our information systems are becoming well geared to deal with challenges in the 21st Century.

Our timelines are elastic, being dependent on how good we become at cross-referencing, re-focusing and re-organising as finance becomes available.

In June 1993, in our submission to the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training Inquiry into the organisation and funding of research in higher education, we put our case for building a world class Australian Buddhist library for collaborative research.

In those days, our library and artefact assets/resources were about AUD$200,000.

We suggested at that time that if a research grant of $150,000 of Government monies was made available we could "fast track" our proposed international electronic database facility.

The Government provided no funds so we "slow tracked" over five years and got our website www.bdcu.org.au and our LAN on line in 1998.

3.0 A glimpse into our chronicles showing how we condensed some irregularities into a model in "the good old days".

As a peak organisation, we have cultivated good relations with Government and Opposition Members for many years.

We were often approached by Senators in "the good old days".

Various Ministers would like to hear our views. This was particularly true in the debates on Multicultural Affairs.

Interesting laws have been proclaimed in Australian Commonwealth legislation of interest to religious organisations.

On 8 February 1993, the Australian Attorney-General declared the Declaration on the "Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief". (UN Resolution 36/55). This was to form part of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986.

Article 6(c) and (d) of the Declaration read:

(c) to make, acquire and use to an adequate extent the necessary articles and materials related to the rites or customs of a religion or belief; and

(d) to write, issue and disseminate relevant publications in these areas.

This law brought our library activities into the public arena.

It is recommended as preliminary background reading.

This 1999 study paper is part of our strategic plan to help our Members and end-users know the big picture of the World's processes for the preservation of Buddha's Teachings.

It also suggests the part we intend to play as "boundary" professionals who can take a holistic view of the needed supply chain management essentials.

We become boundary professionals because we need a library paradigm delivering precepts and guaranteeing a Buddha Dhamma library where quality counts.

From our perspective, literature showed utilitarian management approaches for library tactics which were useful enough, but, unfortunately they took shapes which were fragmentary of sila (morality).

This type of fragmentation is not conducive to developing superlative talent that may come from almost anywhere.

William G. Bowen et al (1999) noted how well an enterprise works - how productive and successful it is in a highly competitive global economy - depends on whether it has the best people and people who are comfortable working across lines of race, class, religion, and background.

The days of insularity and parochialism are gone.

Paul N. Doremus et al. (1998) indicated that globalisation is powerful because it is an idea that has seeped into the imagination of ambitious individuals in all corners of the world, even though many find the concept alarming.

This study paper brings up interesting questions about why Buddhist practices and levels of morality including no killing or stealing in libraries and other wise concepts are not invariably applied to Western libraries.

We thank Members and Friends who help spread our expertise by showing us how to link different machine architectures into heterogenous networks.

We thank the many Members and end-users whose kammic disposition gave them mandala minds adequate enough to answer our invitation to prove to themselves that it is possible to increase their rate of learning.

We thank those persons who have worked on Buddha Dhamma attainments by joining searched good information available from our desktops as a supplement to the usual revered teaching techniques.

With recent gains in our user-interface technology, members of our Knowledge Management Task feel confident they can use our paradigm to find the protocols needed for planning the next-after-next steps.

4.0 "Boundary" propositions used for managing a library networked towards end-user-centric behaviour.

In a 1998 paper, the author discussed scenarios and challenges for Buddha Dhamma in the 21st century.

For decades, we had differences from usual library procedures because we have "boundary" suggestions which must be complied with by Members and end-users.

To introduce an example of a tangible boundary difference in our library practice, consider our handling of imperfect printed pages or any spare paper having references to Buddha Dhamma.

Examples include inked paper glitches from offset printers, draft letters with spelling errors, creased pages from laser printers or photocopies that are too light or too dark. Packages from Buddhist organisations having a name "Buddha" in their title is included in this class of material.

Our library suggestion for such material is to provide a special place where nature could rot these spoiled pages. The aim is to prevent the Buddha Dhamma material being thought of as common "rubbish".

To make this "boundary" suggestion more concrete, we coined the word "rotatorium" for the special place where the material is stored.

After 20 years of use, the rotatorium became full, so we bagged the bottom layer and placed it on a special rubbish collection.

Other local persons comply with this notion.

A Tibetan Monk, resident in Melbourne, followed our concept of a "rotatorium" at his Centre when he found some of his students were " trashing" prints of Bodhisattvas into common dirty rubbish bins.

Several years ago, in discussions with Dr. Richard Gard, the author was advised that no equivalent practice existed in places of Buddhist studies at Western Universities to his knowledge.

In passing, he did mention an overseas Master's rebuke to a student who used Buddhist texts as a seat.

Over the years our efforts have been directed at 5% to 10% of our Members and end-users.

It would be nice to imagine that our information planning in the 20th Century became somewhat more centred on the bottom 80% of our Members as end-users.

There are risks in deviating from well-tried information architecture to using complex technical architecture which may become inflexible and difficult to change.

Andrew Treloar (1993) of Deakin University compared managing network information with drinking from a fire hose - not only is the information coming out too fast to take in properly, the hose itself is continually flailing around, dragging us with it, and making it even harder to take a sip!

Advances in telecommunications have come so fast that only the most flexible have stayed current. Our computer systems have been about one generation behind what is available. Fortunately, our paradigm does not specify the highest level of technology must be used in our library system.

We need to attempt to reduce the gap between the increasingly sophisticated information technology needs of our top researchers and the relative wilderness of our Members who are just able to access our library book catalogue.

Our perceptions are that problems connected to search strategy would be less if details of day-to-day functions in our organisation were placed on- line.

From January 1998, our organisation has broadcast a one-hour weekly program about Buddha Dhamma from a local radio station, KNOXFM.

As an illustration of what we think of as a day-to-day function, our Teacher and his researchers write the weekly broadcast script.

It would be nice to offer research to end-users interested in this media with something more than just unsystematic browsing of 50 printouts of our weekly scripts.

We intend each word in the scripts to be fully machine searchable and the live tapes of each broadcast be indexed for ease of retrieval.

The challenge in our general library is that we have been without a paradigm to generate catalogue rules for indexing library tapes.

We know the paradigm we seek should have the attributes suggested by Mireille Eid (1993) of the University of Technology, Sydney, who lists accuracy, relevance, completeness, cost-effectiveness, reliability and availability as being within the domain of librarians.

The support of research activity for Buddha Dhamma religious investigation projects requires understanding of the distinction between information processes and information content.

We propose to answer most challenges by giving support in two directions. Our horizontal support does regular audits of scholarly information. This type of support has improved 300% or better each year over the last 5 years (1993 - 1998).

Ultimately, as Don Peppers et al. (1999) observed, to lock an end-user into a learning relationship, an organisation must adapt some aspect of its behaviour to meet the end-user's individually expressed needs.

By including this notion, our paradigm for vertical support in supply chain management could accelerate development over the last year (1998).

Our version of vertical support includes providing machine searching facilities for a learning relationship with scholars; and providing some analysis of scholarly information.

Vertical support includes compilation of education and human resource (HR) information on learning relationships and providing abstracts suitable for machine searching about Dhamma education.

As "boundary" keepers, we believe we have made some progress in extracting information from views and opinion to get information fit for scholarly use.

Later in this paper, we will discuss the potency we found by using some verifiable and some unverifiable generalisations on the boundaries needed to develop a general paradigm for comparative librarianship.

We trust this present introduction to our general paradigm gives specialist librarians and end-users sufficient vision to be able to see the place of the library in the achievement of the organisation's goals and objectives.

We are in the prototype stage of adding a non-traditional method of providing service to remote users in the form of an Internet Newsgroup.

An Internet Newsgroup is not a totally new technology. At present, we think we will be looking at LINUX software that is available for operating Newsgroups.

The paradigm is shaped to know only too well that there were ways and means far more effective and much cheaper than following imperious demands to keep updating with the latest technology.

However, since gaining the co-operation of many capable and energetic persons, when we are to make choices about our next-after-next stages, we appear to do so at a more leisurely pace within our paradigm than most organisations.

The paradigm has a cultural strength that our organisation remain interested in generating more light than heat; more insight than hype.

At present, our special library planning has built up a number of specialists on its staff, including several translators, for Chinese and Japanese to English, two good abstracters, three indexers and two information systems specialists.

We exist to train persons to appreciate Buddhist studies and apply the essence of such study (of the 84,000 parts of the Buddhist Canon) to everyday life.

5.0 Why do traditional forms of intelligence on personality, behaviour and behaviour change appear as either integrated or differentiated?

Theories of human personality have presumably existed in some form since persons began to reflect upon why persons act as they do.

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, there is no single widely accepted definition of the term "personality".

The Abhidhamma Pitaka gives a complete list of all possible personality types.

The scholarly environment shows the fullest range of ideas of this topic pervades the religious, literary, legal, and philosophical literature.

Freud's psychoanalytic theories of personality have been the most influential in the modern era of psychological study. Freud's view rested firmly on Triebe (German: "needs", "drives","urges" or "instincts").

Jung, Adler and others were influenced by Freud.

Times have changed and there are about 28 distinct schools of psychology recognisable in the West.

The measurement of personal characteristics is called personality assessment. Efforts to measure any given personality construct can fail. Peers might rate each other along dimensions such as friendliness, trustworthiness and social skills.

In Australia, persons can pay a fee to experience a vast range of professional tests from qualified reviewers.

We respect the privacy of our Members and end-users.

Our present approach is to keep costs down.

Because there are a number of frustrating, but critical questions that remain in testing; we have seen persons who use test results to label themselves making their view of themselves more narrow than ordered.

On these grounds and for various Australian legal reasons, we do not administer written tests.

Our belief system can bypass the direct obligatory steps of other cultures to classify such things as personality on some system.

Buddha Dhamma taxonomy keeps administration costs down in such domains.

In the past, a typical Abbot Monk would have completed eight years of study at a Buddhist University, and would follow this with a Masters degree or Doctorate at a foreign university such as Oxford in the U.K. or Nalanda in India.

In retrospect, it might be argued that the motives for funding such studies were a foreign policy aspect of imperialism in the days of the British Empire.

The net result was that scholar Monks helped lead the U.K. in translation of Buddhist texts into the English language.

From time to time in world history, much higher education Buddhist infrastructure including library material and artefacts has been wiped out.

Australia is fortunate to have visits from a few Monks and Nuns who were international scholars but, as we understand it, they are not as active in traditional scholarship output as their ancestors are.

The new scholarship appears to be functioning to give output in several countries simultaneously.

Some Buddhist scholars appear to waive royalties and allow others use of their copyright so that institutions can provide globally available reprints of their classic texts and dictionaries, at affordable prices or free of charge.

Energies consumed in administration of new weekly Dhamma journals and providing new information and printing infrastructures are not available for scholarship in the classic tradition.

The new output appears as affordable machine-readable CD's holding the Tipitika (the Buddha Dhamma Canon).

There is a growing tendency in Western countries for Buddhist organisations to dissipate scholar's research energies by inviting them to present papers at multifaith Conferences of one or five days duration, which appear to be public events for the entertainment of non-Buddhist audiences.

We do not intend to reflect on the sincerity of the motives of such persons when we say we hold that our paradigm is not to allot more than 1 per cent of our resources to such events.

We have explored how to run our Temple operation so that our library's operations prospect to address and service Members and Buddhist practitioners as end-users.

Our management style is that we are prudent, we are not speculators in trying to be all things to all beings.

Although we receive details of file servers, both actual and conceptual, gained by the experimentation of early adopters we remember early adopters, like all gamblers, have gains and losses.

By the power of kusala (wholesome) kamma; we are more inclined to admire the tactics of the merchants of early Byzantium who had learned to grow mulberry-trees and to breed silk worms; instead of paying the price and buying expensive silk from China.

Because we read voraciously and listen considerably, we gain from other person's experience and use it to plan for low risk as we hunt our next upgrade for hardware or software at affordable prices.

As mentioned earlier, we have been waiting to be able to afford to connect with our students worldwide by newsgroups and have our systems generate answers to their questions.

May those whose struggles helped our leading edge library systems become debugged and operational be well and happy.

From the comprehensive range of 52 possible human types (defined by one characteristic) which have been listed using the system of the fourth work of the Abhidhamma Pitaka; many types have helped in our library over 20 years.

Our Buddhist library paradigm includes experiential practice that has proved useful to help many beings, seen and unseen, because our action steps are framed to have a devamanussanam (Pali - for devas and humans) agenda.

Reciprocity, like a dhamma mirror mind, is an element of our schedules.

For over 20 years, we have been changing the mindsets of our helpers involved in the organisation of our library.

May whatever insights to the practice of comparative librarianship is awakened in persons and devas from the mandala described in this paper help them generate the intention and make the practical bid to practice Buddha Dhamma internationally.

Such accumulated knowledge and skill will assist the cause of Buddha Dhamma for our Centre, the World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB) and the World Buddhist University (WBU).

6.0 Removing archaic biases taught by librarians

It seems we are entrapped in a double bind.

In earlier times, we stood in a double bind (and probably still are) in regard to the power of steam engines, petrol engines, jet engines, rocket engines.

Because of this double bind, one second we stand in a superstitious childish awe fearing the technology, then the next second we desire to master it, have it as our property, and use it more and more, regardless of price.

If we stop our minds for a few moments, and turn ourselves toward critical thinking, we might be able to gain insights into what we think we know about technology, what we suppose we know about technology, what we wish we knew about technology and, perhaps, if we are lucky, we sense something big, heavy and dark like the shadow of an approaching elephant - something that we fear. This is the shadow of what we misunderstand about technology.

We want technology, at an affordable price, to coordinate the dialogue we have with end-users through face-to-face, mail, fax, phone, or on-line communication.

From there, we could learn to know what myths we use as support systems in these knowledge matters.

Then, with the help of the mythic scripts, we could untangle the imagined truths we held about our relationships between technicians and other persons.

The management of the books and artefacts in our collection was started by the author in Australia from a mixture of concepts widely sanctioned about 40 years ago.

To prevent the library from being "too old-fashioned", it has been necessary to review how to calculate our end-user's individual long-term value to our Centre's needs-based library.

We do not dismiss the goal of one-to-one service marketing to our end- users as an unattainable goal.

We need to explore with more vigour what some persons call migration strategies - which are appropriate for dealing with end-user's information that is not well differentiated in terms of needs or value.

At present, we are soliciting Members to advance their thinking about what they need in terms of improved data collection from end-users. As explained earlier, privacy issues about end-users are paramount.

The question to keep under review is how well does our organisation customise its products and services based on what it knows about our end- users?

Rather than get our end-users to sort through all the options themselves, we must learn to interact with most of them to help them specify their needs.

First, we must learn to program our systems for individual recognition of a substantial number of end-users, and, second, we need to remember which end-users prefer which options.

Then, when they connect with us next time, we can give them their preferred option.

If it seems impossible to identify our most valuable end-user, then our best option may be to concentrate on developing relationships with the intermediaries in our demand chain whose identities we can readily acquire.

Then we invent "The One-to-one Gap Tool" referred to by Don Peppers et al. (1999).

The first mark of a strategic plan appears when we come to recognise a general need to make tactics that work to get the plan into operation.

We remind ourselves our task is to develop a religious investigation paradigm suitable for use for a technology driven Buddha Dhamma e-library.

As Glenn Ralston put it in 1998:

"Technology has already swept over us. It is no longer a technological argument, but rather a cultural change".

When discussing using technology to provide new responses to old problems, Dr. James Garner Ptaszynski considered one of the biggest problems he saw in for the appropriate adoption of technology in Higher Education is our limited vision of its use.

Quite understandably, persons tend to think of using technology within the present teaching paradigms and thereby limit its full potential contributions.

Earlier, although clear on the viewfinder needed for paradigm building, because funds did not exist, the library was fashioned from what is procurable.

As a preamble leading to an introduction to the affects of comparative librarianship on end-users, we have our Members recall if they came from a home with books available. The prime librarians of these books were their mother, their father, their relatives or their guardians.

These authority figures chose from some catalogue or other and determined the first books that were read.

Not only did they specify what was read, but they also specified the library opening hours.

They had great control in giving vocabulary and grammar - affecting what was understood.

Our first teachers, rightly or wrongly, had the power to constantly make judgements about how much reading they thought we could cope with.

May our first Teachers be well and happy.

Vygotsky (1978) has called this phase of dependency the "zone of proximal development" which refers to the period during which the child cannot complete the task concerned without help.

The interaction means the very basis of thought is social; the interaction between the parent and child leads to the child tending to think about reading to study new things like his or her first teachers.

For some children in Western Countries, reading under the blankets with a torch, after lights out, may have been one of their secondary library sites.

7.0 "Paired Reading" - strategy matrix

One piece of research by Lindsay et al. (1985) compared a "paired reading" program with a "relaxed reading" program in which parents were taught simply to hear their children read with strong emphasis on the benefits of being positive and supportive.

This appeared to work well.

Tim Haslett and Charles Osborne (1998) of Monash University have examined complexity theory and local rule theory.

Local rule theory as developed by their research suggested that the view which suggested that behaviour could be shaped by macro-level or senior management decisions was, at least, incomplete.

Local rules influenced organisational performance tot he extent that they provided successful behaviours that were "pay-off maximising" for groups of persons.

A substantial literature exists on crowd psychology and the operation of the collective consciousness.

"Paired reading" is an example of a culture that has remained unchallenged in our organisation for 20 years.

We have collected data on the complexities of "paired reading" instruction to find out if we should increase or decrease its use.

"Paired reading" has been used to a great extent to nourish informal relationships between Members and give them the "unfaithful" contentment of having companions to talk to as they learn; rather than read instruction sets, each for himself or herself, on paper or screen-based media.

We use "unfaithful" in this context to mean cannot be relied upon.

There is a general perception that "paired reading" in the library was operating with a low level of autonomy and was having a negative impact on performance and generating complacency on behalf of both parties with regard to quality of performance.

For example, clear written instructions are available for cataloguing books onto our relational database.

Instead of leaving new Members to read for themselves, our former librarian would talk in a "paired reading" session and train persons to expect a slow entry rate of data.

When some persons could enter data about four times the pace she could, she would set up obstacles to prevent their access of the particular database machine.

An unbiased observer could easily form an impression that her goal was to interfere with the reduction of the backlog of books awaiting cataloguing. With other Members, she would set a data to achieve a specific number of book completions. The figure set was modest.

Even after the fourth time of not achieving her modest target, she would not agree it might be useful to see what happened if we abolished the "paired reading" instruction stage and left he trainees to catalogue straight from the 3-page instruction sheet.

Accurate measures are registered on the database software e.g. date of entry and the number of books entered.

She felt threatened and in spite of her apparent consent that it would be a good idea to "catch up", she resisted ideas that would give more autonomy to her assistants and has since left the organisation.

To gain an overview of preferred strategies for "paired reading", a strategy matrix is a useful tool.

We decided to use a tool developed by William Byrt and Professor Peter Bowden (1989).

On such a matrix, the present position and likely position in five years time, given present trends, has been mapped.

X: Present position on "paired reading"
O: Likely position in five year's time, given present trends.

Because of modern media, radio and television, we have a great expectation that someone will read news to us.

Often, we fall asleep under such conditions.

By the time we arrive at formal libraries or work stations having written text and hear someone reading aloud, like it or not like it, they are compared with echoes of our prime libraries.

For superior searching of a database the end-user ought to have a vocabulary at least equal to that used in the database.

One of our present machine searchable databases uses about 35,000 words, including some Pali.

Although "paired reading" is labour intensive, our staff library training accepts this process.

Since 1994, we followed a system of phasing down "paired reading' because we decided we wanted an ANDROGOGY CULTURE.

Andragogy, as a professional perspective of adult educators, must be defined as an organised and sustained effort to assist adults to learn IN A WAY THAT ENHANCES THEIR CAPABILITY TO FUNCTION AS SELF-DIRECTED LEARNERS HAVING A PATH TO SCHOLARSHIP.

We extend this to lifetimes of learning.

Self-direction can be defined as:

" . . . a learner characteristic or readiness to direct his (or her) own learning in the framework allowed by the situation. Only readiness for self-direction can make a self-directed learning process possible. Readiness for self-direction is not a permanent state but one that develops constantly. Therefore all can develop their readiness for self-direction." (M. Knowles 1999)

Characteristics typically connect with the self-directed learner include:

1. internal motivation (not requiring control or rewards) and the intention to use it;
2. systems (setting and reaching of goals) and the intention to implement them;
3. positive ideas of his or her own self as a learner and the ability to implement them;
4. initiative and intention to use it;
5. flexibility and intention to use;
6. responsibility for one's own learning and intention to do it;
7. ability and intention to co-operate;

It is almost universally recognised, at least in theory, that central to the adult educator's function is a GOAL AND METHOD OF SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING. (J. Mezirow 1981)

We are retaining some "paired reading" because like joint proof reading, it does generate some acts of friendship. We think camaraderie in its motivational aspect is conducive to the notion of lifetimes of learning.

We intend to sample the hours per week persons engage in "paired reading" or its equivalent.

We doubt if "paired reading" is a legitimate approach for persons who are fluent in the English language' but for those who use English as a second language (ESL) we find it useful to align their English words with our sanctioned usage of Dhamma terminology.

Although we intend to phase down "paired reading" for some persons, we intend to leave a window of opportunity for our Members who either use English as a second language (ESL) or Languages Other Than English (LOTE) who could benefit from "paired reading".

The linguistic features of the spoken language include phonology/orthography, morphology and syntax.

LOTE discourse features include prosodic features, turn taking, completion of each other's utterances, gestures and non-verbal language.

Our library resources include excellent Dhamma dictionaries mapping Pali and Sanskrit into Chinese and English.

Ed Neal in his June 1998 article in 'The Technology Source' seems to question the virtuality of learning technology compared to the reality of the classroom.

Glen Raiston, in a response to Ed Neal, believes we did learn from the mistakes made with instructional television. His simple disagreement with Neal is that this depiction of that straw man ­ and now a mindset ­ has not existed for ten years.

It is worthwhile to remember that this may be overstated and he was writing in the U.S.A. We doubt if this is true in other countries such as Australia.

8.0 Introduction of Anglicized Pali terms into our search engines

It may be too big an ask to expect all our end-users to learn Pali and Sanskrit languages, just because from time to time we want to refer to the meanings inherent in some of the words of these disciplines.

Yet, two decades ago, we pioneered a direction where end-users searching in English can meet Pali terms half way.

We decided to use a half-breed terminology having no diacritical marks as might be expected in Scholar's Pali.

This filled the need for clarity of expression of at least some of the mental concepts held in the Pali meanings.

To triumph over debates in which the meaning of English words gave the only manner of thought; over the last two decades, we have introduced Anglicized Pali terms for our end-users and they have accepted these terms. In doing this, we followed the traditions used in Anglicized Latin.

The aim is to direct the end-user to another magnitude of thought pointing at the Buddha Dhamma.

Many electronic Pali turning points are about to shape our future.

In Thailand, two quite separate projects have been completed to transfer Pali texts, their commentaries and translations not machine-readable databases ­ one by MAHIDOL University in Bangkok, the other by the DHAMMAKAYA Foundation, whose headquarters are situated near RANGSIT, which is north of Bangkok.

Each project was seemingly started from a completely opposite perspective, the MAHIDOL project being inaugurated by the university's department of computer science, while the DHAMMAKAYA Foundation was inaugurated by those whose main interest was Buddhism (though not necessarily in Pali).

We are providing facilities for such CD gems.

As an example of our preferred terms in Pali, we use Pali terms to acknowledge three distinct stages of learning subject matter.

These stages are:

1. Learning (pariyatta)
2. Putting into practice
3. Realisation of the many truths of the problem in all respects (pativedha).

In Buddha Dhamma, there is a distinction made between four types of knowledges.

The Pali term "sammuti-nana" is a designation for what we call the logical category of "general knowledge".

This genus is distinguished from the genus of "precise knowledge", based on exact definitions (pariccheda), and from various other kinds of knowledge which are classified according to their objects. Switching form one genus to another for knowledge work is encouraged.

May all beings be well and happy.

This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes and Leanne Eames.

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