Information Science

 

 

My first job after graduating was in Information Science for Unilever at Port Sunlight on Merseyside. I had a bruising time in my final exams failing the organic practical test. Despite this I got a degree although not as good as I had hoped. My personal tutor grumbled that students who fail exams were not usually awarded degrees and strongly suggested I should be relieved by the outcome.

Nevertheless my confidence was shaken and I resolved to seek a job which did not involve practical work ( not “on the bench” in the jargon of the time ) After some searching I took the job with Unilever. Information Science was very new and the Unilever laboratory was among the leaders in the field. Essentially the job was in two parts- archiving and indexing research reports, and current awareness. This latter meant keeping project teams abreast of everything they needed to know.

In a sense this was acting as a super librarian. The difference was that we were expected to become close to the scientists in our particular areas, understanding their projects, and actively seeking out information for them. This was a two way process; one way we searched the scientific literature for them and they came to us with questions. The other way we needed to understand their projects well enough to know what literature was important.

There wasn’t much tuition- it was a case of learning on the job. It was a bit easier in that the team of about ten was in transition and four of us were  new. The section manager arranged for all other section managers to individually talk about their current projects which gave us an overview of the laboratory activities. With a total complement of about a thousand and about 250 scientists the activities were many and various. Essentially the laboratory supported the Unilever soap and detergents business so this meant everything from basic surface science to product development and test. There were also active groups supporting engineering, plywood and adhesives and other activities within the interests of a large and diverse company.

I was allocated analysis, engineering and the hard surfaces product development division. This latter covered mainly dishwashing and floor cleaning but as its name suggests any type of hard surface cleaning. This contrasted with personal cleaning and fabric cleaning; the other main product development groups. Almost as an incidental I took on the organisation of the library.

One major weakness was my knowledge of foreign languages. While English is the main language of science others have a role. Despite my weak French and German I became a volunteer abstractor for a major UK journal with the objective of improving. I found this laborious and time consuming and I gave up after a couple of years.

To  keep senior managers informed we took the Financial Times. For a while it was my job to search it first thing before it was circulated. I always felt a job which required newspaper reading first thing on arrival couldn’t be bad ( It was considered bad form to put your feet up on the desk while doing it! )

The job posed many challenges. The project scientists varied a lot in their attitudes from those keen to be helped through to those who scoffed. What made my life difficult was that essentially I always knew much less about the projects than those working on them in the lab- I soon learned to be humble.

The engineering group were easiest. They were company trouble shooters so they had many and varied interests mainly around wear and corrosion. Their job interested me and I relished the compliment their section manager gave to me ( couched in careful language “ quite useful and helpful”.)

An event occurred which was to be very significant for my whole career although I didn’t realise it at the time. The Divisional Manager of Hard Surface Cleaning, Bill Bone, decided to get all his staff together and spend a day brain storming possible advances. He asked me to take notes and produce a list of the ideas. My section manager straight away said I would be overwhelmed and suggested I record the whole session and then abstract  notes afterwards.

This is what I did spending a weekend reviewing the tape and producing a summary of the ideas proposed. Even though I say so myself I finally got a document which reduced a somewhat chaotic discussion to a manageable list of ideas.

Bill Bone obviously at least then knew my name, hopefully thought I had done a decent job, and sometime later suggested it would be good for me to take a secondment to his group for six months to widen my experience; to see life as a consumer rather than a producer of information. My immediate boss agreed. This offer was supported by the deputy lab manager who was my ultimate boss. I had severe doubts but I judged it would not be politic to refuse. Bone was a big wheel in the organisation and a request from him carried the force of an order.

The secondment became a turning point. I enjoyed  product development and I was quite effective. I liked the idea I was the principal investigator rather than simply supporting someone else. I left information science and my secondment grew into a year and then two and then a permanent position. I’ve since spent all my career in some form of product development.

I was fortunate in my first section manager out in the lab, Arthur Johnson. It was his first managerial position. While the other managers in Bone’s division were rather reluctant to take me on, he was willing to take the chance. He soon said how I did my job was up to me as his role was to set the objective and facilitate my work. I got on very well with him; he was quite free with advice, and this was usually sound, but all the time he emphasised that it was my responsibility to meet the objectives as I saw fit. Ironically although we got on well Arthur had little regard for information work. He would say unless it was published in the premier surface science journal he wasn’t interested as it would be beneath him. Regrettably this type of arrogance was quite common and led to quite a bit of wasted effort as work which was known and published was duplicated needlessly.

The part of information work I enjoyed most was the “detective” work in digging for information that wasn’t obvious. The skills I developed then have been useful ever since.