88Mechanisms
10 Cooperation and the future of
national networks
DEREK LAW
When I was invited to give this paper I was asked to give a free-ranging and open-ended round-up drawing together the themes of cooperation as expressed in the earlier papers. That is of course a little difficult since, like you, I only heard the last two this morning. However, rather than sounding like one of those judges awarding marks for performance in the music festivals I used to attend as a child, I thought I would prefer to construct a paper around the three key words or phrases of 'future', ‘cooperation' and 'national networks', and to fit comments on the preceding papers around these, even if it makes things sound a little disjointed and repetitive in places. So, first, to cover the future I shall use the LIB2 report which identified a number of trends in library automation and I'd like to look at them. Secondly, you may have noticed that the word 'library' does not feature in the title of any of the papers you have heard,· although it featured extensively in their content, so I'd like to look at the growth of national networks in which libraries are not involved, but which have everything to do with the future of information provision. Trying to draw together some of the themes from the preceding papers will cover cooperation, and I then hope to draw all three strands together.
The LIB2 Report was prepared last year by the Library Association and the Library Technology Centre for the EEC and is more formally called 'State of the Art of the Applications of New Information Technologies in Libraries and their Impact on Library Functions in the United Kingdom'.1 It is an excellent report, although with a title like that it is hardly surprising that it is contracted to LIB2 in normal usage. It indulged in a little fairly safe but none the less useful speculation on the future. The authors identified seven areas of future development and I shall look at each of these in turn, since they all have some potential relevance to the theme of
this seminar. They were:
1 consolidation of the present generation of library systems;
2 the growth of networking facilities;
3 broad Iband networks permitting the exploitation of mixed media;
4 the emergence of OPACs (online public access catalogues);
5 exploring the potential of CD-ROM (compact disc-read only memory);
6 the growth of multi-user micro-systems in small libraries;
7 a greater integration of the information industry.
The first of these themes then is 'a consolidation of the current generation of integrated library systems with more sophisticated interaction between the functional software modules'. This seems to me undeniably true but just a little worrying, for in our pursuit of ever-more sophisticated, ever more baroque systems aimed at ever-more efficient libraries we lose sight of the fact that we have to develop information .services to meet the needs of our users. There is a sense in which there is not a single automated library in the country. There are many mechanized libraries and Chris Leamy talked of mechanized national bibliographies, but despite the millions of pounds spent on systems in the last decade, the reader still has to come to the library for a book; still has to look up a catalogue, albeit on a screen rather than a card, but possibly still in a catalogue hall; still has to go to an issue desk and perhaps queue to check out a book; when the book is overdue the reader still receives a piece of mail and has to come back to the library to renew the book or pay a fine. We have created some very fine systems over the past twenty years to do all of these things very efficiently and many of the papers you have heard have given insights into that strand of development and how it is still progressing.
John Beard showed that local cooperation has been a feature of life for many years, although FD3 (the LISC report on the future development of libraries) has undoubtedly given it a new impetus. I remain an agnostic on the local plans, if only because I fully share Beard's view of the need to put effort into service delivery not systems management, and the plans, no matter how worthy, seem to put the stress on systems management. However, although Beard stressed the prirnacy of delivering a service, the sense that I get from his paper is that effort is being directed at finding existing best practice in each area of cooperation and adopting it as some kind of standard or target. As Chris Leamy said in answer to a question, the aim appears to be consolidation rather than ,the creation of anything new - and who can blame librarians when faced with all the pressures Beard described?
This same message seemed to be coming from Leamy, albeit on a wider national and European scale. He talked of efficiency and savings, of performance measures and equipment discounts. The European Library Cooperation Plan which he described had in its Action Lines a sort of ritual genuflection towards innovative IT, but rests, or appears to rest on linking catalogues and on conspectus, which can be crudely caricatured as saying that we're going to have bigger catalogues and, count how many books we have. ,Hardly visionary stuff, if typical of the EEC.-
The European dimension is a fascinating one, if only because it is thought that the EEC and/or the Council of Europe has a potential wall of money ready to throw at library problems. What I find unsettling is the way in which other Directorates ill the EEC appear to be spending all sorts of .money on what may loosely be termed information delivery systems. They are not particularly advanced systems,
but they are. well in advance of the European Library Cooperation Plan and are aimed at the business and industrial marketplace, apparently cutting out publicly-funded libraries. The essence of all that Learny and Beard describe is that our future continues to lie in speeding up and cheapening our existing roles and hoping that somewhere along the line we can scrape up a little money for new initiatives.
· In my view, true automation implies a completely fresh approach. It implies taking advantage of opportunities so that the reader can do everything from having texts delivered at the office in machine-readable form to paying fines or charges by electronic transfer from a bank account. For the last twenty years, libraries have had an introverted concern with administrative constraints and have planned systems and cooperated on the basis of notions of efficiency and economy. As Brenda Moon ably considers in an article in the first issue of the British Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2 perhaps it is now time to ignore our libraries and begin to explore the developing information needs of our users,
before they are met in other ways and by other people. In our rather inward-looking world it is easy to forget that we, and where they exist our computer centres, have no monopoly of automation and that developments in other fields may be creating competitors for the role of information provider. But there is hope. Never let it be forgotten that the commercial marketplace is often crass. After all, its reaction to high-quality computer graphics was to put Playboy online, presumably to ensure that the VDU really did make you go blind.
The second point made in the LIB2 Report is that there will be a growth in networking facilities 'in which libraries will require dial-up access, faster data transfer, gateway facilities, more sophisticated LANs (local area networks), value-added services, and OSI (open systems interconnection), all leading to integrated information systems'. Again, there can be little quarrel with this prediction, although I do
not think there is any inevitability about the development of integrated information systems. They will require a great deal of pioneering work. Developments in communications technology will be the bedrock on which the next generation of information services, the sunrise services, will be built. Dial-up will soon disappear as services are called up from desktop micros and only finance will dictate the pace at which this happens. I also take the view that worries about that finance are grossly over-rated. My own library makes no charges for online searching and tries to make it fairly freely available to research staff. Despite this, the cost of such use runs at under 1/2 of one per cent of the annual budget, while the cost of a ten or twenty megabyte hard disk IBM-compatible micro is about the same as we raise in photocopying revenue every three weeks.
Data transfer is more of a problem, since it seems to be a constant source of astonishment to computer managers that anyone possesses a single file of more than a couple of megabytes, far less wants to transfer it to another part of the country. The growth in line speeds is encouraging and will no
doubt continue, but it still depresses me that the technical manager of the Research Libraries Group finds that the most efficient way to transfer a catalogue update from San Francisco to New York is by putting a magnetic tape on a Boeing 747. Gateway facilities are beginning to grow and will soon mushroom as we get to grips with communications technology. Most of us have been familiar, perhaps unwittingly, with the PSS (Packet Switched Service) to IPSS (International PSS) gateway for some time and are now beginning to become familiar with the JANET (Joint Academic NETwork) to PSS gateway. Mike Wells mentioned links to EARN (European Academic Research Network) and ARPANET and even more exotic networks like SABINET and ZIMNET have possible uses, but there has been no serious exploration of these by libraries as yet. I suspect that we will see the typical bell curve of growth here. It is extremely encouraging to have had Professor Wells here talking to us. He has been a staunch supporter of the involvement of libraries in networking and had a large hand in ensuring that the very active JANET Library Users Group was set up. There seem two areas for
growth here. First, we may expect a growth based on housekeeping data, the obvious areas being acquisitions and interlibrary loans, variants of the sort of system described by Robin Yeates. However, we may also expect an increasing interest in the holding of and gaining access to very large datasets which cannot sensibly be replicated in every institution. It then seems likely to me that once people have the capacity to transfer that part of the dataset relevant to their needs they will do so.
I have always been able to date exactly when computing arrived properly in UK libraries. It was in 1969 when I was at library school and for the first time an option of automation was included in the syllabus as an alternative to Historical Bibliography. The only thing I remember about that option was a now forgotten book which claimed that the future role of librarians would be to stand at the man-machine interface. In the broadest sense that remains true, in that the future appears to lie not in creating the networks – Mike Wells and others will do that for us - but in creating, harnessing, disseminating and interpreting the value-added services which will increasingly be required.
Lynne Brindley talked about the wired campus. In some ways the most interesting point here is that the driving force for change is not usually associated with the library. As she has pointed out, there is a strange dichotomy between the academic process which is concerned with progress and development and the academic view of the library which is conservative and nostalgic. Lynne Bindley is herself an
interesting precursor of the next generation of information specialists - known in the USA as communication czars - working in an environment which aims to have what Dartmouth College calls 'a plug for every pillow'. Let's look at the wired campus for a moment and the market in which it places libraries. I've discovered some facts about the Edinburgh University Network of three ,years ago, Just to show that this is not a purely American phenomenon. Brindley suggested that these developments were futuristic, but when one considers the pace of change I would certainly take the view that consideration of our role and the future pattern of services we should offer is an urgent concern.
Brindley used the phrase ‘Academics will have freedom of choice'. Well, consider Edinburgh. The library is, of course, a component of the campus network, but it is only one among 70 machines linked to a system which planned to have some 2000 terminals with access to the network. It is perhaps overstating the case that there are then 70 machines capable of competing with the library, but if any of them can provide information services to its community more efficiently than the library, it will.
Open Systems and the Linked Systems Project were covered lucidly by Roger Butcher. As I’ve said, this is perhaps the most fundamental part of the new infrastructure. Computing has been bedevilled by standards from the start and open systems is conceptually an enormous breakthrough. There are of course difficulties, because there are many ways of implementing a standard as Butcher showed, but OSI has already provided a revolutionary breakthrough in computing in the UK as demonstrated by JANET. There are also the value-added services, such as the typesetting and printing service offered over JANET from Oxford, or with less relevance to us perhaps, the access to supercomputers. I, then
find worrying the trend which links libraries to particular suppliers in a closed link. While this may well have enormous short-term benefits, it seems to me ultimately to be a dead-end.
That perhaps leads on to BEDIS (Booktrade Electronic Data Interchange Standards), which Malcolm Peters brought us up to date on. I had what I can only describe as the misfortune to serve on a MUG working party looking at this area some ten years ago and regret that the working party managed to produce a report which recommended not using the MARC standard. A number of more distinguished members of MUG also served on that working party, but we had best draw a veil over that. The problem was and is that there are significant commercial investments at stake in this area. I increasingly feel, however, that we make a mistake in allowing the book retailing side of the business to take the lead in all this. Libraries have tens of millions of pounds invested in MARC and there is no reason to be apologetic about that, We also operate in an international trading environment and it would be unfortunate, to say the least, if we finished up with America and Australia having BISAC adopted as an international ISO standard, while we pushed ahead with an incompatible Tradacom standard of use only in the UK, especially if there is difficulty in relating it to MARC. Fortunately, the SCOT report produced by the Booksellers Association seems to offer both a way ahead and a forum for examining the wider political rather than the purely technical considerations and for ensuring that the needs of library supply are fully explored. I would wholeheartedly endorse the arguments of Phil Holmes for a MARC-compatible international standard in a paper which he gave to the seminar on avoiding an electronic babel, last year.3
So, this whole area of communications and its technology is identifiable as important, even if we are not, yet exactly sure what to do with it. Is it too fanciful to compare the Situation with the discovery of America where a small group of zealots, convinced of the importance of what they were doing, set off to discover a new route to an existing continent and unwittingly found a completely different one of amazing potential and richness? '
I'd now like to turn to the point that ‘broadband networks permit becoming part of a multi-media information network for learning and teaching'. An enormous amount of research is going on in this area, but it may still be characterized as experimental. The range covered is vast from the Livenet system in the University of London, through the EMPEROR Project of Ching-chih Chen, to the so-called Star Wars trio of Carnegie-Mellon University, Brown University and MIT,' which Brindley visited and which have invested nearly $200 million in the last few years to develop teaching programmes and tools. These examples could be multiplied, and certainly most UK universities are considering when, not whether, to install speech and data networks. Nor is this activity confined to the academic sector. The government has now commissioned a study on requirements for early in the next century. Most of us will be at least vaguely aware of the television shopping and banking experiments here and in the USA and it is clear that there are again vast commercial interests involved, so far mainly in the entertainment field.
The study commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry, at least in part as a response to the Peacock Report on broadcasting, reflects worry at the way that cable networks have failed to take off in the UK, although £200 million has been invested in cable facilities in the last five years. Two extreme scenarios are postulated by the year 2005. In the first, there would be a single common carrier
network based on optical fibre and serving all consumers. Competing companies would then offer a range of entertainment, information, education and business value-added services. At the other extreme there is a situation where the technologies compete, with two or more competing telephone networks, offering extensive services to business but a limited range to domestic users. Demand does not justify
extensive use of fibre optic and terrestrial broadcasting remains a prime entertainment medium in at least a substantial minority of homes, while some mains borne signalling is used for the control and metering of domestic appliances. In short, should there be competition in networks, or competition In the services they provide? The answer to that, whatever it is, will have a critical effect on the future of the services we provide. The study document clearly sees information services as an area for commercial activity.
The papers from Beard, Dwyer and Yeates all gave views on how cooperation is developing at local and regional level, much of that activity quite properly being aimed at increased cooperation and linkages between bibliographic systems. The VISCOUNT project aims to provide a coherent interlending and bibliographical network, although as described by Robin Yeates it has some rather nice additional features but it is still essentially concerned with the creation of more infrastructure to promote more efficient use of libraries. It remains a private viewdata system, although it does have
the merit of testing a more widely applicable technology. Like John Beard, Brendan Dwyer saw the problems as problems of resource rather than technology, because the technology is there. Beard mentioned the lack of reliable information on what users want. In the public sector, we tend to broadcast services on the principle that if you throw enough information some of it will stick, at a time when in my view we should be narrowcasting services, tailoring them much more specifically to user needs. Some authorities in the UK are looking at this in the form of community information services, although the best known is' possibly the Pikes Peak system, 'Maggie's Place', in Colorado. Here all sorts of activities from the traditional library functions, through weather information, local bus services, lists of clubs and car-pooling arrangements can be accessed from home computers. Note that this need not mean that the information is uncommercial. For example the bus company pays the library to mount its timetables. But look outside libraries: cable television, satellite, fibre optic are all rapidly moving us towards not just a multi-media but the global village of MacLuhan. Electronic mail comes from Australia and Zimbabwe, databases sit in Addis Abbaba and Rome, the Council of Europe and LIBER are exploring the exchange of catalogue records across national boundaries. The consciousness of this is now penetrating even popular music. On the Graceland album, Paul Simon sings:
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere.
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires
This must be a clear reference to Robert Maxwell and Pergamon Press, who amongst others will be competing with us to provide that constant information. The question which these papers then leave with me is not how do we achieve the linkages and cooperation - we can demonstrably do that - but what do we do with the links, how do we use them imaginatively to open up new areas of service and support? Brenda Moon cites the case of the archaeologist who in future might expect before he departs for Crete to have available, online through the library, information about the geography, climate, soil, excavated sites, museum holdings, flight schedules and local bye-laws, as well as a list of relevant references.
One foretaste of the way ahead is the emergence of OPACs which LIB2 says will 'have a considerable influence on subject access, on the source data required in a record, on the way in which libraries organise themselves, and on the amount of computer processing power required to support
them'. OPACs already seem very old hat, but in fact we are only just beginning to grasp their impact and cost, not least the way they devour CPU (central processing unit) time. There are many avenues to be explored. What is to be included in these OPACs? If everything, there is a frighteningly long way to go with over 30 million records still to be converted in the universities alone. If not, what is to be
excluded? How do we determine the criteria for selecting what is to be omitted? Who is to have access, and on what basis?
Then there is the question of linking the data. Since the demise of the little loved plan for the UKLDS (UK Library Database System), attention has concentrated on look-up of other library catalogues, while more recently CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) has looked at
an index of records rather than a shared database. Then there is CAG (Cooperative Automation Group). What is its future in all this, and can that self-perpetuating oligarchy survive, or will it change when faced with a new generation of looser groupings or cooperatives? Of one thing I have no doubt; such cooperation will grow and it will be fundamentally underpinned by the MARC record structure. You will all remember Maurice Line's old aphorism that what is wrong with libraries is that as bicycle factories exist to produce bicycles, so libraries exist to produce catalogues. That period seemed to have passed, but I see again the looming threat of the primacy of the catalogue in libraries. The virtue of
OPACs is what they can do to enhance the activities of users, not what they can do to enhance the quality of cataloguing. Tony McSean talked of sharing data and it is only fair to say that the British Library has made great strides in the last year or two in this field and that new developments in the pipeline, such as the link to OCLC, are very encouraging. It is also true that some of us may feel that the BL were dragged kicking and screaming into this, but it would be ungracious not to thank them for the progress made so far. On the other hand, it is irresistable to point out that in some areas the BL, under the terms of its Consultative Paper, will in future be cataloguing to a different and lower standard than many of us. The issue of other libraries contributing to the British National Bibliography was raised; after all, the British Library is not the only national library far less copyright library in the UK.
The meeting here on the Consultative Paper was positive and produced a number of different strategies. No one doubts the seriousness of the problem facing the BL, but if contributed cataloguing offers a different approach, why not take more time to reach the correct decision? Presumably the worst that can happen is a small increase in the backlog. It seems to me inevitable that some kind of effort will be made again to link bibliographic files on a national basis and we must hope that the British Library will wish to be involved. The issue which should then concern us is not how to bring this about, but what impact it will have on services. Tony suggested that the use of GK3, the British Library catalogue, other than by librarians was a sensitive issue, but is it unreasonable to expect that a reader in Aberdeen might use JANET to check a book in the GK3 catalogue then send an e-mail message to reserve it for use in the British Library Reading Room three days hence and that when he gets there he will be able to get a fax of an article from the National Library of Wales and perform some data analysis using census material held online at the ESRC Archive in Essex?
Both Brindley and McSean mentioned the emergence of CD-ROM as a storage and exchange medium which the LIB2 report also says 'is likely to have an impact on the development of in-house databases and on the balance between the use of internal and external information services'. Any of you
fortunate enough to visit the major exhibition at the recent IFLA conference in Brighton must have been astonished at the range of products already available commercially, and anyone organizing a session there had only to include the magic phrase in the title to guarantee a capacity audience. But that is not enough to ensure success. When the LIB2 report appeared, CD had two great drawbacks for libraries, namely that they could not be overwritten and updated and that they are single-user systems. The first of these has already disappeared in that Phillips claim to have solved it experimentally and no doubt the second will in time be solved. What worries me a little here is that unless the problem of single-user systems is solved, they will be used by single users. If a researcher has a grant or contract worth £100,000 it may well be worth spending a few hundred pounds on a single-user system, while the library will probably feel bound to continue using hard copy which can be passed around many users.
The penultimate point made in the LIB2 report is the growth of multi-user micro systems in libraries. Again I have no quarrel with this, but why suppose that that growth will be confined to libraries? Departmental networks linked to file servers, document readers and small databases containing the set of information needed by an organization will again provide an alternative to the library. I can do no better than quote Roy Adams on this.
Some view the future of the library within the information
chain as simply a more efficient version of the
existing structure, with IT supporting traditional processes.
Others see the demise of the library and a radical
Change to a system focused directly on the end user, the
intermediary function becoming redundant.4
Lastly, LIB2 postulates greater integration of the information industry as electronic media become cost-effective. Until very recently, libraries have had a virtual monopoly on the dissemination of information, but that is rapidly disappearing. On the other hand, the resources now available to us do
offer a possible additional role in the creation and publication of information, more closely tailored to the needs of users. There is ample evidence that we fill our shelves with the wrong, in the sense of unused, material. It is now no longer necessary to collect material against future speculative need but to consider an approach which tailors information provision much more closely to the needs of users. It is here that our examination of the mechanisms of cooperation must take us. We have the building-blocks which will allow us to offer the sort of information services which I believe will be required in future and it is the exploitation of networks, not their creation which will provide the cement which binds
these blocks. In their different spheres both Aston University and Pikes Peak are exploring this future.
I would now like to address briefly a theme which has underlain much of this talk, and that is national networks and the future of libraries. Traditional academic librarians may feel that they have long since ceased to be of use to the scientist, that the business schools and the social sciences and
maybe even the lawyers with their Lexis databases have also now.departed, but why worry; libraries equal scholarship equals the humanities equals the Arts and Theology faculties and they can't do without our vast treasure houses of knowledge, even if they wanted to.
Well, let me ask a question. Here is a list of twelve recent initiatives related to the humanities:
the Booth working party on computer use in archaeology
the CHArt Group
the Computers in Teaching Initiative and its Support Service
the DISH project at Glasgow
FAMULUS
the GLOSSA system for foreign language texts
HUMBUL
the Nelson Report
the Oxford Music Processor
Project CALIBAL
Project Pallas
Project Quartet
Give yourself one point for each of these you have heard of and another five points if you could talk about them for one minute without deviation, hesitation or repetition. Did anybody here score more than ten? Let me describe them very briefly.
• Booth concerns the recording and transmission of site data at archaeological digs.
• CHArt brings together art historians and computer people to look at areas such as the digitization of high resolution images.
• The Computers in Teaching Initiative aims to support local projects developing software for use nationally in support of teaching.
• DISH is one such project on teaching history students how to use datasets culled from things like nineteenth century poor relief records.
• FAMULUS is a general-purpose bibliographic package used worldwide for the maintenance of personal catalogues, with powerful search and retrieval features.
• GLOSSA is a sort of online crib to difficult or foreign texts, with constantly updated notes and bibliography held on a local database.
• HUMBUL is the online Humanities Bulletin Board held at Leicester and available over JANET.
• The Nelson Report was a 1983 Computer Board report which in effect promoted the wired campus as a desirable aim in the UK and which made interesting assumptions about libraries.
• The Oxford Music Processor allows music to be prepared on a computer keyboard and distributed for student use.
• Project CALIBAL aims to replace book-based teaching of New Testament Greek and Hebrew with machine-based forms.
• Project PALLAS is an Arts faculty programme of computer- assisted learning at the University of Exeter.
• Project Quartet relates new technologies to academic needs nationally, is funded by the British Library and bypasses libraries
The information on most of these topics comes from a fascinating and terrifying book called Information Technology in the Humanities by Sebastian Rahtz.5 It is a book of 100 pages on the enormous changes sweeping through teaching and research in the humanities which has, I suspect
largely passed us by in mutual incomprehension and it is terrifying because the word library does not appear once in that book. There seems to me to be a quite fundamental danger that in our creation of ever-more sophisticated library computer systems we are building a vastly expensive library subculture which will turn out to be a supreme irrelevance unless we are very careful to participate in the changes which are taking place in other fields.
After that relatively brief overview of the ground covered by the conference papers and a longer look at how the LIB2 Report saw future trends in UK libraries and how networks of various sorts are springing up independently of libraries, I want to turn to the technology. Dwyer used the phrase 'We
have the technology'. The danger is that we forget that so does everybody else. As with many others I have become aware that in our concentration on library computing we have neglected the way in which automation has developed in all disciplines. The enabling technology has enabled everyone and not just us. I don't know what the average age of MUG members is, but I still go to conferences where people
like Mike Wells note with astonishment that the control for his domestic central heating system is more powerful than the computer on which he first undertook research. One way of looking forward is to begin by looking back. When you stand back from computing over the last twenty years there has been an astonishing transformation in what we can do. Now I don't want to look specifically at library computing which has been well covered here by Chris Leamy and in a recent article by Lucy Tedd in the Journal of Documentation,6 but at the way in which computing has looked to users, at least in the universities.
When I left university in 1969 computing meant batch-work on mainframes. Such terminals as one saw were teletypes churning out their pink paper tape, while data input was largely on punched cards. Until quite late on in the 1970s output was entirely upper case - remember all the union lists of serials? It was not until the middle and later 1970s that terminal .access became available to the public user and even then the number of possible simultaneous users was very low. It was at that time that BLAISE was opened by Shirley Williams, the then Minister of Education. Then came the eruption of micro computing. Do you remember how seriously we all treated Sinclair's ZX machine? Now 10mb and 20mb hard disk pcs are everywhere. In 1985 the American Council of Learned Societies conducted a survey of scholars7 which showed that 45 per cent of respondents owned or had exclusive access to a computer compared with 2 per cent in 1980. This paper has been constantly amended over the last day or two in the light of the comments of previous speakers, thanks to a 512k Amstrad which I brought up with me from London. More recently the same thing has been happening with communications. Gone are the days of even ten years ago when it was just possible by a laborious process to send an overnight batch job to the Regional Centres and machines such as NUMAC. A year or two ago electronic mail was an esoteric orm of communication between a few consenting adults. Electronic mail was very slow to take off in the universities, but at the start of the year some kind of critical mass was reached and JANET availability grew at the rate of about one University library a week. Telecom Gold now has thousands of users – including booksellers - using it for everything from sales to games. It is not then very surprising that this has begun to have an effect on disciplines even in the Humanities. When we do look back over twenty years, or even ten, to see the mushrooming of ·general access to automation it would be foolish to argue that this is yet another false dawn.
The other great theme of librarianship in the last year or two has been preservation and, paradoxically, that poses another threat to traditional librarianship as the search for surrogate formats leads inexorably to machine-readable forms. Alex Wilson8 has seen these developments as threatening
to bypass the library and that is a concern I would share. As one becomes involved in the area it soon becomes clear that a small army of keyboarders has been converting the text of much of our heritage into machine-readable form without the knowledge or at least comprehension of libraries. On the other hand, .every problem is an opportunity. These technologies are only a threat if we ignore them. At the
moment we command the middle ground With a mixture of traditional library services and the sunrise services such as information retrieval. At one end we are constrained by reductions in funding which threaten a catastrophic diminution of those services. At the other end we are threatened by quite new ways of addressing information and research, posed by pcs, communications and efficient mass storage devices, which offer large facilities to individuals or small research groups.
Information will be harnessed and shared cooperatively and libraries can be a part of that future, but by a conscious act of progession, not as of right. Once the monopoly has gone, the only way to stay in the game is to offer a better service than your competitors, and that can be done. Consider the assets we have: trained staff, experience of the technology, interpersonal skills, efficient worldwide document delivery systems, standardized systems for describing packages of information, knowledge of the structure of information, a good public image, substantial budgets. In a sense then, what I see is the opposite of national networks, but information systems focused much more on the individual or small group. However we need to so link our networks nationally and internationally that we can deliver
appropriate information at the appropriate time. This also implies that the library role as storehouse diminishes while its role as switching centre grows.
So I offer a polarized future: adapt or die; if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem; those who are not with us are against us. These two extremes can be caricatured by passages from recent fiction, describing the way in which two fictitious heroes use their libraries – after all a service implies a user, and the user's reaction is paramount. Consider the British Museum Reading Room as described by Alison Lurie in Foreign Affairs .9' Her hero,
Fred,
often has to wait for the constipated digestive system of
the ancient library to disgorge a pathetic few of the
volumes whose numbers he has copied from the complex
unwieldy catalogue. And even when they arrive all
is far from well. Fred IS used to working in a study of
his own, away from noise and distraction. Now he is
surrounded by other readers, many of them eccentric or
even possibly insane, to judge by their appearance and
mannerisms - filling dusty volumes with multi-coloured
slips, tapping with their fingers or feet, mumbling to
themselves…and blowing their noses in a contagious
way. He also likes to spread out his work ... In the
BM his tall, muscular frame is cramped into a chair ...
between two other scholars or lunatics and their encroaching
heaps of volumes, in an ill-ventilated hall full
of identical radiating seats constructed on the same
plan as the model prisons designed by Victorian moral
philosophers.
Compare this jaundiced view with that of David Lodge's in Small World, 10 where Professor Morris
Zapp says,
Information is much more portable in the modern world
than it used to be. So are people. Ergo it's no longer
necessary to hoard your information in one building, or
keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There
are three things which have revolutionized academic life
in the last twenty years, though very few people have
woken up to the fact: jet travel, direct-dialling telephones
and the xerox machine. Scholars don't have to
work in the same institution to interact, nowadays: they
call each other up, or they meet at international conferences.
And they don't have to grub about in library
stacks for data: any book or article that sounds interesting
they have Xeroxed and read it at home. Or on the
plane going to the next conference. I work mostly at
home or on planes these days ... As long as you have
access to a telephone, a Xerox machine and a conference
grant fund, you're OK, you're plugged into the
only university that really matters - the global campus.
Lodge tells us in short that the American Express card has replaced the library card. Libraries can continue to have a distinct and distinctive role in the information chain if they not only embrace the technologies which are available, but examine critically how these can be used to deliver services
to the end user. Never forget that as our skills develop, so do those of the user and it is not in offering services but in creating value-added services that the future of networks must lie.
References
1 State of the Art of the Applications of New Information Technologies in Libraries and their Impact on Library Functions in the United Kingdom, London, Library and Information Technology Centre, 1987.
2 Moon, Brenda, 'Cooperative networks and service to the scholar: university library resources for online research', 'British Journal of A cademic Librarianship, 1, 1986, pp.41-52.
3 Holmes, Phil, 'Barriers to electronic data transmission', Bookseller, 13 March 1987, pp.970-973.
4 Adams, Roy ]., Information Technology and Libraries: a future for academic libraries, London: Croom Helm, 1986.
5 Rahtz, Sebastian, Information Technology in the Humanities, Chichester: Horwood, 1987.
6 Tedd, Lucy A., 'Computer-based library systems: a review of the last twenty-one years'. Journal of Documentation,43, 1987, pp.145-65.
7 American Council of Learned Societies, Survey of scholars, 1985/86, in Scholarly Communication, 5,Summer 1986, pp.1-16.
8 Wilson, Alexander, Libraries in support of scholarly communication in the Humanities. LRCC Occasional Publication, 7. London, LRCC, 1987.
9 Lurie; Alison, Foreign Affairs. London: Michael ]oseph, 1985.
10 Lodge, David, Small World, London: Seeker & Warburg, 1984.