The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives

Since about 1994, the contemporary inclination was typified by the subject matter of papers introduced at the 1994 Third International ISKO Conference.

In general, the talk of that Conference was about advances in knowledge organisation. At that time, Derek Langridge was studying "the universe of knowledge".

However, most librarians thought about the topic as "the general theory of classification".

By 1996, it was fairly clear to AVCC and others that access to information and the ability to analyse it and thus "create" knowledge will be the hallmark of successful organisations.

During the next ten years, it is predicted that the network will become more pervasive and the availability of interactive networked resources and information will radically change the social fabric of Australia.

Internet availability in local Victorian secondary schools will raise the expectations of students who will become "information literate" at tertiary level.

It would be nice if our library could arrange for our future teaching and learning processes to consider our target audience in terms of his or her preferred learning styles.

Myers-Briggs describes four patterns:

* ES (concrete active)
* IS (concrete reflective)
* EN (abstract active) and
* IN (abstract reflective).

We question if we ought use helpers and end-users of the first type in the library.

We do not design more and more learning experiences to cater for persons with a strong desire for concrete learning experiences.

The reason we deny applying our resources along that style is that at a certain stage we found that if we persevered with this type of delivery in the library processes, it appeared to cause a materialist viewpoint strengthening.

Such persons find it difficult to resist their defilements that lie dormant in the recesses of their minds.

When defilements lay dormant they are called latent, underlying or hidden (Pali: anusaya).

If a person fails to exercise systematic wise attention (yoniso-manasikara) at this stage, the defilements escape either through the doors of speech or deed or through both, and that is called transgression or going beyond (vitikkama).

The "transgression stage" is coarse. Sila (morality of five precepts) checks the "transgression stage". This is why the helpers in the library and end-users must operate with morality in our working site.

We do not empower persons who act as if they had a wish to destroy the credibility of our records or cause unnecessary costs to rise when operating in our economically viable library.

The characterisation of such persons is that, after some success in the library cataloguing area, they start to misfile texts, "accidentally" delete computer files or damage library equipment.

This happens when helper persons have made enough merit to arrive at the vision needed to experience the "transgression stage".

They become mischievous by "playing tricks"; such as hiding things from their fellow helpers.

In Buddha Dhamma constructs, it is said that the grounds for these range of behaviours can be traced to the person lacking auxiliary merit to exercise morality restraint at that period.

Since such behaviour is not uncommon, we have a policy of moving such helpers to other tasks, such as supervised gardening.

We do not assemble them together other helpers of similar concrete mindsets.

We provide interludes where persons can experience their preferred way of concrete instruction up to some boundary.

This cycle can happen about three times, then they leave if they cannot make the change. We have a mission to provide a special library resource, and it cannot operate as a general store for everyone who wants to use it as a general information exchange.

After some months, persons who have made sufficient merit return to library work.

At conception, classification in our library was based on Edition 18 (1971) of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). The first division was into ten main classes numbered 0 to 9.

The concept of discipline, or branch of learning, is fundamental to an understanding of Dewey's system.

The primary basis for DDC arrangement and development of subjects is by discipline, while subject, strictly speaking, is secondary.

No class can be said to cover the scope of marriage, or water, or copper; in others words, there is no single number for any of these concepts or subjects.

By rule, a work on marriage belongs in 301 if it deals with the sociological aspects of the subject, in 155 if it deals with the psychological, in 173 if the ethical, in 390 if it deals with customs, in 613 if it deals with hygiene, and so on. DDC scatters subjects by discipline.

We wished to resist this scattering.

To avoid scattering by proper Dewey classification, we avoided ranking from the point of view of social context. In other words, we chose to restructure an existing classification scheme to suit our own ends.

To keep Buddha Dhamma things en masse, we took the "quick and dirty" path of selecting from a "slate" of a few early basic Dewey numbers to express Theravada, Mahayana, Ch'an (Zen) and Vajrayana (tantra) notions of subject matter.

This "slate" ranking use of DDC to resist the scattering tendency was devised to help the one Member who had any interest in and wished to be responsible for cataloguing our backlog of library books.

Unfortunately, this Member tended to vacillate (in fear of making an error) when looking for the "correct" DDC number.

The "slate" method guaranteed a more rapid entry procedure which was needed in the 80's.

The "slate" method also reflects more closely recent developments in thinking on the organisation of knowledge: that is, that knowledge about a specific domain, in this case Buddhism, not be scattered into different disciplines.

Our founder estimated that at the prevailing rate of cataloguing books it would take one hundred years to bring the index up to date.

At that time, the DDC library index was hand written on three printed cards.

To bring about sympathetic endorsement that something had to be done about the pace of library development standards, our founder initiated the study group mentioned earlier and obtained suitable software. This software was obtained as a tool and a technique for organising knowledge, in this case the contents of our library.

The standard we introduced ranked the library as seventh rate.

We needed to accept that our organisation could make use of unskilled helpers who were not trained librarians to catalogue existing books in the 1980's.

Helpers felt confident enough to choose to enter one of our "slate's" DDC numbers onto the book file of our data base, enabling them to use new technology to successfully organise knowledge held in the library without the need to acquire specialist librarian skills.

We designated in the late 1980's that superior word-by-word search engines to help end-users ought become available to our organisation sometime in the 90's.

What started to look like an unpretentious tactical plan for library development in terms of a "third rate library" became understood by most Members as a path to value relevance.

Rationally, we wanted Members to browse in the library, meet and join with the library helpers of that time and presumably help, to understand why, and therefore understand the process.

This section is in at least two segments:

* one using Wertbeziehung (which is translated as value relevance)
The first exposition is along the conceptions of Weber. The importance Weber attached to Wertbeziehung (value-relevance) gave facts as selective assertions about reality.

* the second where social meanings are organised "within the framework of the categories of familiarity and strangeness".

Therefore, on that first segment, facts are selectively constructed. Theoretical interests formally specify principles that justify and guide the construction of different types of facts.

Social sciences have different theoretical interests to "hard science" because they state from a formal presupposition that individuals are "cultural beings" who lend significance to the world they inhabit (Weber 1949).

The second exposition follows the concepts of Schutz where the production of meaning, not the attainment of meaningful goals or ends, is central to the theory of action.

Katz (1969) noted that few professionals talk as much about being professionals as those whose professional stature is in doubt.

The increase in professions and the growth of professionalism has long been recognised as a major characteristic of industrial societies.

Neither segments have little to offer persons seeking an interpretation of classic Marxist theory of class action because we do not feel we do not view our compassion as an organisation permits us to take too strong a position where we must be viewed either as oppressor or the oppressed.

We are not value-free in either segment, rejecting fatalists, nihilists or eternalists because we act to formulate the factors for some persons to induce them to change their sad, bad or mad lifestyles.

Actors in Weberian theory may well be fictitious "puppets" because the depicted consciousness of such actors "is not subject to the ontological conditions of human existence" (Schutz 1962).

For Schutz, ideal types are typified meanings, called "cookbook knowledge" or common sense.

When we say, en passant, we acquiesce to the notion that persons are unequal in reducing their personal history by adequate causes we use expressions which circumvents central issues in Weberian sociology raised by the problems of historical knowledge.

From birth chances, educational chances and so on, we may or may not attribute these measurable things as outstanding in differences in a person's merit from past times.

So, for one person to be separated from parents at an early age may be important to them; while for others it is not so important because they went to a more understanding situation.

Hopefully, both expositions are equally useful to a few persons, and one or the other favoured by the remainder.

So, the background of description used for analysis must be sound for your mental health. Sound mental health means you are educated and so on.

Sound mental health can hold ambition to do better without feeling there is a need to trample others to achieve one's own goals.

This is win-lose thought. The education system a person exploits is karmically determined by a person's past actions because you have used that system in past times - you have learnt that way before.

So, why would persons seek tools and techniques for knowledge organisation different to those used in the past that they feel were comfortable in exploiting?.

If one person "curls up with a book" to relax, can the same person curl up with a book to learn? Can the same person read the book from a screen and relax?

"An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an excellent activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy.

"Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water" (Gardner, 1961).

Historical research provides the methodological counterpart to the theoretical interests of the social sciences because of its ideographic orientation, its orientation to unique, non-repeatable events.

Selection of facts as potential objects of analysis implies not simply studying A or B, but a value-orientated construction of A and B.

According to David Zaret (1980), Habermas stressed correctly (Stammer 1971) that Wertbeziehung "is not related in the first place to the choice of scientific problems, but to the construction of possible objects of cultural scientific knowledge".

The principle of Wertbeziehung and the task of analysing the genesis of uniqueness in social life condemns theory to a noncumulative proliferation of paradigms (Weber 1949).

The first part of this section must be read in that light.

According to Professor Peter W. Sheehan in his Presidential Address to the Australian Psychological Society in 1978, historically speaking, four professions can lay primary claim to the term "professional"; they are Law, Medicine, the clergy and university teaching.

According to Moore (1970), a profession can be defined as " an occupation where incumbents create and explicitly utilise systematically accumulated general knowledge in the solutions of problems posed by a clientele".

As Goade (1969) states, certain professionals can't really do their work unless they are capable of injuring their clients.

The case for classifying librarianship as a profession is weakened because librarians can't do any real harm to the persons who read their books.

The wrong book at the wrong time can cause harm.

Eleven primary components of social-ethical thinking as evaluated by Shakow in 1978 were abstracted by Professor P.W. Sheehan in the same year.

The eleven points were:

* A good profession is one that is motivated by a sense of social responsibility. No profession should aggrandise itself beyond the point necessary for its giving the best possible service.

* A good profession is one sufficiently perceptive of its place in Society to guide continually its practices and policies so that they conform to the best and changing interests of that Society. The Profession should not invest itself in a status quo that is demonstrably out of line with public welfare.

A good profession is one that is continually on guard lest it represent itself as one able to render services that are beyond its demonstrable competency. It should guard itself against the delusion of pervasive omniscience.

* A good profession is one that is continually seeking to find its unique pattern of competencies and one that concentrates its efforts on the rendering of unique service based on that pattern. One outstanding competence is the ability to serve Society through research.

* A good profession is one that devotes relatively little of its energy to "guild" functions, to the building of its own in-group strength, and relatively much of its energy to the serving of its societal functions.

* A good profession is one that engages in rational and noninvidious relations with other professions having related, or overlapping comptetencies, and common purposes.

* A good profession is one that devotes a proportion of its energies to the discovery of new knowledge. Like all professions, Psychology should actively seek the advancement of the basic knowledge that lies behind the socially relevant skills that the profession employs.

* A good profession is one in which there are good channels of communication between the discoverers of knowledge and the appliers of that knowledge.

* A good profession is one in which preparatory training is validly related to the ultimate function of the members of the profession.

* A good profession has a code of ethics designed primarily to protect the client, and only secondarily to protect the members of the profession.

* A good profession is one that is continually concerned with the validity of its procedures and techniques. It is always possible for the profession to maintain a scientific attitude, that attitude which leads to the continual seeking for evidence and a respect for it when it is available.

One more principle added was:

* A good profession is characterised by a an adaptive balance among efforts devoted to research, teaching and application.

Awareness of the constraints imposed by these 12 qualities were developed on a platform of writing things down.

R.W. Russell (1978) noted that when confronted with queries about the importance of human resources organisations respond in a stereo typed manner that persons are our greatest resources and "we must pay attention to their needs".

Yet, in everyday life, decision makers focus so firmly on changing input variables that effects on outputs are not heeded.

Decisions affecting human resources are especially prone to such errors.

As an example of the financial stringency that was needed to consider the use of how we approached printed material, we had need to have a photocopying machine on site.

Such a machine was used for printing our Newsletter which was the BDDR predecessor. Paper was donated by Members in the early days.

Costs of suitable paper and toner escalate each year.

To sustain the ever increasing rate of our library's printed output, more photocopying of internal newsletters and reports to keep about 100 persons a week supplied meant our photocopiers wore out and had to be replaced.

In the future, there might be a decline in the amount of development work of library organisation and research projects.

Reduced budgets mean the library must seek technology developments which will enable them to provide adequate service.

For many years, our library produced a photocopied newsletter.

THE BROOKING STREET BUGLE was issued about every 6 weeks.

It was subversive in the sense it was conceived to act as the grapevine to help Members drop objections to perpetuating their old-fashioned scripts involving some levels of racism and sexism.

For Members to be involved they needed to be informed about the changes of culture which were necessary for the organisation to undergo to conform with the Equal Opportunities Act.

The BSB hinted that some Members might bring about more professionalism.

The BSB introduced the concept that the spread of change would involve more and more computer systems needed for betterment.

Graphics of situational comedy from a talented professional illustrator helped us to focus on some of the particular natural minutia bestowed by the garden inhabitants.

Videos taken at the time of regular ceremonial happenings, such as the parading of the 8 auspicious signs in our garden setting were used to educate Members of the need to order the site.

Our Ch'an Academy had many Buddhist artefacts or resources on site; Illustrated Sutras, Ch'an works and calligraphy, Ch'an stone constructions in a garden setting, flower beds and so on.

The sound of the Buddha bell in the Northern Gate Tower was used in the garden.

Walking to the ching or wood block "skull" or chanting multicultural performances of mantra in our garden setting helped awaken persons - to name just a few methods.

As these buried garden assets became visible to occidental Members and more true Dhamma followers used them, the appreciation of these cultural items became more widely helpful.

The tradition that a Temple garden holding a Bodhi Tree can inspire and arouse interest and faith was found only by practice in a Dhamma garden setting.

"Lack of faith" that such a truth set series exists is the major chagrin of many Western persons who lack wisdom enough to see how the Bodhi Tree can serve the purposes of Buddha Dhamma.

To give a succinct version of why "lack of faith" exists; it is handy to contest it as a created need in persons who wish to avoid having to undertake "hard work and lots of it" to improve their mindfulness.

The way of the garden as taught by our Teacher showed up issues.

The first task aimed to use some time-honoured poems to persuade Members they needed to make the effort to develop a more friendly style in their relations with the Temple garden.

A management advance was to the use of the garden so it could be a nearly painless exercise place. At that time, several Members were unfit in their physical and mental being.

Since their lifestyles were limited to indoor living, they had no markers for the four seasons.

Ignorant of the sun glistening on the early morning dew that has set on the grass and leaves, they were deprived of the heavenly beauty of a rainbow appearing suddenly after a sun shower, they could not see the clouds which were shaped like dragons, they missed the golden sunsets, the reflection of the moon on the Quan Yin pond, the full moon in the sky.

They were also not aware of the rose thorns which would tear skin and raise blood, or the low hanging branches which would bruise and cause headaches. Giving the precept not to kill living beings,they found the mosquitoes that suck blood and dangerous spiders that bite live in the garden. They saw for themselves that nature was uncomfortable and an inconvenience.

If they thought about the food they consumed, they had contempt for the peasants who worked the land to cultivate their foodstuffs.

As Members dug the humus heaps or weeded around the flowers in the garden, they developed some idea of the labour of others who were in their food supply chain. The obvious became evident.

Metropolis living in Victoria is blazed in artificial light. Well lit streets are everywhere.

From the garden perspective, Members gathered a different feeling for the passage of the sun across the sky, a more archetype sense of time, or even of day and night.

They could find the existing time and got to know of the existence of the many insects, worms, birds, dragon flies and lizards that depend on our site's garden for their nutrient.

Not knowing the time or place, gardens were watered at midday and nails were hammered late at night which disturbed our neighbours.

This left them both sorrowful wretches and misfits in nature.

So, it was decided to agree that intensive development of the site meant long-term administration of the garden was emphasised.

May all beings be well and happy.

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

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