John Ross

John Ross, by Bruce Royan

John Ross, Managing Director of Infologistix Ltd, and one of the UK pioneers of library automation, died on Sunday 20th November 2005 after a long illness.

I first met John when I started work in the Bibliographic Services Division of the British Library in the autumn of 1975. He was one of a very bright multidisciplinary team which had been brought together to develop a new kind of library automation system called MERLIN . With his cybernetics background, John was concerned that this software should have a strong theoretical underpinning, and he was often at the centre of quite heated debates within the team.

Nevertheless, we hit it off personally, and were soon collaborating on a number of journal articles, and in particular in the seminal ASLIB conference on the use of minicomputers in libraries which he organised.

MERLIN was attempting to implement largely untried ideas on a prototype computer (the first of the ICL2900 range) which had a mean time between failures of around 4 hours, and after about a year, John traded the frustrations of software development for a new set of challenges, becoming the IT representative for the Science Reference Library, a key internal user of the BL’s existing IT services.

John Douglas Ross had been born in Cleethorpes in 1946, and spent much of his early childhood in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. His West African childhood was punctuated by periods at boarding school in England, where he had developed a lifelong love of cross-country running.

Another abiding passion was politics, which he took up while still living with his parents in Trowbridge. He had taken delight in helping the Liberal campaign from one house while his parents ran the Tory one from a few doors away.

By 1974 he had been elected a councillor in Braintree, a role in which he served for many years. When the possibility of standing as an MP in the 1992 General Election came up, he was willing to uproot home, family and business to move into his prospective constituency in Nottingham. Alas, that ambition was not achieved, and as the demands of the day job increased, he contented himself with serving on the Stapleford Town Council for the remainder of his life.

John had taken a degree in Cybernetics: he always claimed he had only enrolled to find out what the people at Reading University thought the word meant, and that by the end of the course he had learned enough to disagree with them! After two years working for English Electric Computers (later ICL) he went back to university to research library automation at Essex. This lead to an MPhil in Computer Science, a field of which he was equally dismissive. John was interested in breaking down the artificial barriers between a range of disciplines, including computer science, knowledge management and librarianship. He maintained they were all concerned with the acquisition, organisation, storage, retrieval and presentation of information – what he called Information Logistics.

In 1978, therefore, John set up his own company, Infologistix, to provide consultancy services in this field. He found a ready demand for his expertise, building an extensive client list at home and abroad, starting with a year’s secondment to the Norwegian centre for R&D in library automation, Norsk Dokumentdata.

Over the years he has worked for a vast range of clients: government departmental (Inland Revenue, DHSS, DoE, DTP, MAFF, Radiocommunications Agency, Lord Chancellor’s Dept, MOD, DTI), public (Braintree, Brent, Lambeth, Newham, Rochford, Southwark, Westminster), national (British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Museums of Scotland), special (Royal Geographical Society, National Curriculum Council, National Childbirth Trust, Incomes Data Services, Institute of Personnel & Development, International Coffee Organization, Internet Archaeology), higher education (University of Ukraine, Royal College of Nursing), and commercial (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Amari World Steel, Amerada Hess plc, British Gas, British Telecom, Co-operative Wholesale Society, ICI, ICL, Ilford, Marconi Radar Systems, National Girobank, Nationwide Anglia Building Society, Rio Tinto Zinc, Saatchi & Saatchi, Trustee Savings Bank).

In 1988, while I was completing a contract in Singapore, John wrote to me suggesting he should include me as an Associate in some of his proposals, and sure enough he had me started on an assignment within one week of my return from Asia. The STARS system had been demanded by Lord Young as incoming Secretary of State for Enterprise on discovering how difficult it then was to find out who knew what in his new department. STARS must be one of the few central government projects to have been completed successfully, on time and within budget. It’s perhaps a pity that Lord Young had in the meantime fallen out of favour with Maggie Thatcher, and was no longer around to see it.

Stephen Castell, the system performance modelling guru, got a similar phonecall in 1990, which led to him and John being employed as expert witnesses in a range of court cases where John’s knowledge of queuing theory and human nature were put to very good use. Many other researchers and consultants were recruited as Associates in this way.

John had a wry and well-developed sense of humour. It was wise to take some of his statements with a measure of salt – or at least to look out for the twinkle in his eye when he said them. On one occasion he claimed to be doing a project for “a religious organisation” which turned out to be a Swiss bank. Just after he sent a Final Demand to an Iraqi Library client, Operation Desert Storm was launched: he claimed the whole operation had been commissioned by Infologistix as a debt-collection measure – and indeed the outstanding invoice was paid shortly after.

Despite being a keen long-distance runner and committed Liberal Party activist and producing vast numbers of reports and proposals, John always laid claim to a natural indolence: a favourite saying was “If it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done”. Final drafts would often arrive in emails timed at 05.45, and courier services must have done well out of him over the years.

For a politician, John wasn’t very (small P) politically minded. Schmoozing did not come easy to him. If he disagreed with something, he would prefer to say so, even if it upset someone. Sometimes his Proposals dwelt at some length on the inadequacies of the original Invitation to Tender. He might have lost some contracts, but he retained his integrity.

John had been battling with cancer for over a year and had been determined to attend his youngest daughter’s wedding in December. Though he did not quite make this goal, he remained very active until the end: planning and bidding for new business for the company and attending many of his regular council and group meetings, wearing his now familiar cricket hat to disguise his loss of hair.

John leaves a wife, three grown up daughters and three grandchildren.

Bruce Royan, Concurrent Computing