92UKOLN
12. What Forms Will Cooperation Take?
Derek Law
Librarian, King’s College London
With such a large theme to tackle in so short a space of time, I have chosen to divide my talk into four main themes and to look at four areas of cooperation: end-users and libraries; library to library; the role of the British Library in a networked environment; and libraries and publishers, considering the political, economic and strategic issues rather than the technical ones. A number of initiatives are under discussion and I will draw attention to these and their political context. However, it should be clear that at this stage the process I want to describe is largely one of attempting to define the real questions rather than the answers.
The great changes made possible by the technical empowerment of the individual remain to be fully worked out. There has been a huge increase in the growth of personal computer power. For example, Professor Jack Meadows has produced studies demonstrating that the overwhelming majority of British scientists are now wholly reliant on computers for their writing and research and will comment on that later in the conference. Some research is only possible because of the existence of computers. At my children’s school they have a new hymn which begins:
We live in a world of computers
Just you press a button and you’ll find it done
These tools, when combined with networks, offer unheard of access to information and an undreamt of ability to process it. Although any single library will contain a diminishing proportion of the information relevant to the individual, the individual can already create a sort of virtual library. It is entirely possible to be a member of several libraries; to send reference enquiries to one, book reservations to a second and ILL requests to a third. Nor need these libraries even be on the same continent. The only thing that stops, say, document delivery to the desktop, is our administrative and bureaucratic procedures, and certainly not the technical capacity of existing networks and systems. The creation of such virtual libraries by individuals poses some very interesting funding dilemmas, particularly in the British higher education context where we must both cooperate and compete at the same time. At this stage however, all we need to do is to define the question and it is reasonably stark. Will there be libraries with acknowledged regional or national responsibilities, which have some element of central funding or will we move to a market economy where every transaction requires the transfer of some unit of resource. I would tend to the view that some overall national information policy is desirable and that there are some national needs which must be maintained and supported in good times and bad. Further, we should be looking to balanced regional provision with all the information resources of an area taken into account. I suspect that this can be done within a framework of care and value added (= charged) services, but networking will quickly force home both the desire to access other people’s resources and the ability to move to “just in time” rather than “just in case” librarianship. I shall be returning to this point.
While this debate is going on, we are slowly producing an alliterate population, but one which has increasing technical skills. For generations there has been an equivalence between literacy and knowledge, but that is slowly beginning to break down. It is not difficult to conceive of numerate and articulate students who acquire all the information they require from non-printed sources. It would be ironic if reading for a degree became a contradiction in terms, but it is not inconceivable. Before too long, the link between libraries and end-users may depend much more critically on the teaching of information management skills than on the provision of textbooks. The role of the librarian as navigator has been explored elsewhere and is already a fairly mundane concept before it has even happened. To a lesser extent this is true of knowbots, knowledge robots, searching the networks for relevant information. Already software such as WAIS and HYTELNET have been convincingly demonstrated as powerful tools which can influence end-user behaviour and expectations. With the removal of the tyranny of distance it is possible to use many libraries directly rather than just one and we can be sure that end-users will wish to take advantage of that. Our task is to make that possible rather than block it.
Although this is a general conference, we must take account of the pivotal role of JANET and that implies some understanding of trends in Higher Education in the United Kingdom. It seems likely that as the RTX model of university (including polytechnic) funding develops, most libraries will be forced into specialising in their collecting policy. RTX divides institutions into teaching only, teaching and research in all disciplines and teaching in all disciplines, but with research in some. We can also be sure that the new Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCs) will have no interest in creating a further fifty research level libraries in the polytechnics and so cooperation will be promoted. The three-tier structure of Research, Intermediate and Teaching Universities is already well on the way to being created. After the next research selectivity round in 1992/3, top-rated departments will receive four times as much money as bottom rated departments and we may expect a rapid reinforcement of the RTX model. The end of the binary divide will, I suspect, quickly seem less important than the common reactions to the chosen funding mechanisms. The stated position of the HEFCs is non-interventionist, but I do not believe that that will be the case under any government. The judicious use of earmarked and top-sliced funds will be used to drive the system in particular directions. Parallel developments in other sectors leave me mildly encouraged. For example, the development of local information plans is interesting. Although perhaps a little half-hearted in some quarters, there is scope for development of regional focuses. Equally, should compulsory competitive tendering in the public sector come in, and that may be driven by the European Community irrespective of the election result, we might expect to see LIPs forming bidding consortia, or more obviously, members of LIPs bidding to run the services of other institutions. Universities running nursing libraries; public libraries delivering services to FE Colleges; it is hardly an extreme concept. In networking terms, the key to all of this will lie in document delivery. Present mechanisms are slow and unsatisfactory and there will surely be rapid change here and probably a proliferation of providers, especially once the high capacity information superhighways such as SuperJANET come into play. There are excellent models both in the American Ariel and the French Foudre projects.
One of the new key players in this arena is the Information Systems Committee. This audience will be very familiar with the potential of SuperJANET. Perhaps less well known is the development of UKERNA, The U.K. Educational Research Networking Association. This new body will bring together network users. More importantly, a change in legal status allows the network to be opened up to all researchers and everyone connected with research. The clear aim is to provide links to government, to commerce and to industry as well as to the rest of the public sector. If industry and public libraries in particular can be persuaded to join, the network may open up much more readily into an information marketplace where major libraries or consortia can sell their wares to smaller groups. As higher education institutions enter arrangements for the franchising of courses we can also expect some growth in network links as a way of increasing provision at the franchised locations. I know that this has already happened in the Universities of Southampton and London.
But the ISC has further ambitions. You will again know that the BIDS service was set up here at Bath. A second national deal for Embase has just been agreed, although its location remains undecided. However, the ISC has now set up a Working Party to define a national datasets policy. That group should report by the summer. At the same time the Research Councils and others are developing their own policies and it is hoped to bring the different policies together later this year to determine how far they can be reconciled. Potentially any member of UKERNA will have access to all such data, whose critical element is that it is free at the point of use. As if this were not enough the new chairman of the ISC has declared that the ISC will concern itself with a national strategy for the acquisition of information.1
For the last quarter of a century, library automation has concerned itself mainly with gaining control of the physical artefacts which we possess in our collections. More recently we have begun to take an interest in the information we do not possess and how it can be made accessible. The concept of the virtual library has become a powerful one and one which colours thinking. Two years ago the CVCP proposed an initiative which had no backing within the Library community. Indeed that community was not consulted and the proposal drifted along without a champion. More recently the ISC, now with responsibility for library automation has taken an interest in developing in developing a library initiative and it seems possible that we can build on the CVCP plan to create a major research programme. A proposal of principle has just been approved by the ISC, although this now needs to be worked out. This might have three elements, relating to teaching, research and library housekeeping systems.
I have already mentioned that Graeme Davies of the UFC has firmly declared that he has no interest in building up another fifty research libraries in the former polytechnic sector. This implies that there will have to be mechanisms for providing a due balance of access to research materials, a point I shall expand on presently. The initiative might then explore the mechanisms for setting up such provision, which will have to take account of international networking links, national services such as datasets, but also special collections and centres of excellence and how their resources are to be funded and shared, and finally, what is to be made available at local level.
Secondly, such an initiative might look at the infrastructure which supports teaching and learning. It is one thing to have a group of enthusiasts create and disseminate exciting courseware in hypermedia. But what are the implications of bringing in student centred learning right across an institution. How do you deal with staff who can’t or won’t cooperate? What are the roles and responsibilities of academic services? What are the resource implications?
Thirdly, there is the question of library systems. Looked at as an administrator, it is difficult to see why institutions are buying systems which duplicate student registry records, which duplicate much of the information in the finance office, but do it wrongly, which are hardware dependent in a way which produces expensive maintenance costs, which act against an institutional hardware policy and which are notoriously difficult to link technically with the campus network and its developments. From a librarian’s point of view, I see it as increasingly open to doubt whether we should be buying systems which integrate the wrong things with system design that looks and feels twenty years old and with a development path which I feel quite unable to influence – or in some cases perceive. Libraries have bought integrated systems to provide a single answer to their problems. I increasingly feel the need to question whether there are not several questions and possibly therefore several answers. Library housekeeping provides a stable set of activities which have much to do with the administration in the rest of the institution. Library information services on the other hand, live in a much more erratic environment where technical solutions are adopted and rejected with bewildering speed and where new opportunities and even standards constantly appear. The former may be characterised as introverted and the latter as extrovert. I would then like to see some exploration of the unbundling of systems. A library initiative might see how the housekeeping can link into administrative systems; how different modules could be purchased from different suppliers and in particular how information activities can be detached from housekeeping. One might even look to create MAC type families, even if that means removing the choice of systems or their components from the library, to the benefit of the institution.
Let me now briefly look at the “Forty” model (see Figure 1) developed by Professor Forty, former chair of the ISC and Vice-Chancellor of Stirling University. Whether or not one agrees with the detail, it is important in that it clearly demonstrates one model of the balance between local and remote provision that I have been describing. It shows local power and data where it is needed and a range of data and machines available at national centres, but all of this transparent to the user. Many elements of its application are demonstrated in Bruce Royan’s paper (earlier in this book) on the way systems are developing at Stirling – and this is clearly not a coincidence.
Figure 1. The Electronic Campus
It is curious to raise these issues of forms of cooperation and even to talk of national information policies with no visible role for the British Library. I was brought up to believe and still hear older colleagues retail the view that the British Library is the cornerstone of the library network in the United Kingdom, that it has services which are the envy of the world and that the only problem is that the government won’t give it enough money. And yet after twenty years of believing this, I wonder whether the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes may not be relevant. The BL plays a decreasingly visible role in most of the libraries I know and it is in danger of being marginalised or excluded from the networking developments which I have been mentioning. The financial and organisational pressures caused by the opening of the St. Pancras building and the transfer of many functions to Boston Spa, deserve and receive enormous sympathy, but continue to make it a more introverted organisation, unable to follow far less to lead developments. Although interesting experiments have been carried out at Document Supply Centre, there is a lack of any visible strategic vision of the role and implications of networking and so other visions which bypass the British Library, here seen as a block to the system, are being developed. The BL had an excellent history of technical innovation twenty years ago, but it is now in the embarrassing state of having its major document supply system described as “quaint” in a forthcoming American publication.2
Consider some of the ordinary attributes of the meanest of research libraries these days. We all have e-mail and rely on it. The few BL staff apparently interested in networking have to survive with guest mailboxes provided by the Joint Network Team. The new St. Pancras building will open without a networked OPAC, but OPACs are already considered rather old hat in most research libraries. A lot of work is going on the area of end-user document delivery, but this seems to raise barely a flicker of interest in the BL, while the notion of a user requirement for networked multipurpose PCs at St. Pancras, which would allow OPAC access, a bit of network data collection and software to analyse data or even wordprocess seems to have gone unnoticed. This growing separation of the BL from the community may also be seen over standards. A recent example of this came with the failure to conclude a deal with the National Library of Medicine for the provision of the Medline database to CHEST users over JANET. NLM, assisted by the British Library, insisted on a proposal incorporating inappropriate standards and delivery mechanisms – that is, inappropriate in a British context. The proposal was rejected by the academic community more on technical than on price grounds and by a huge majority. This may seem surprising given the involvement of the British Library in the proposal, until one remembers that its unwillingness or inability to become seriously involved in the networking which now underpins most academic libraries leaves it disastrously out of touch with the development of strategic thinking on national information policy and standards. The issue of standards is central to networking and information development, but the position of the BL is quite unclear.
The failure of the NLM deal coincided with the conclusion of a deal with Elsevier to load its Embase onto the network, following the ISI model at Bath. This continuation of the BIDS experiment will again have the support and funding of the Information Systems Committee. That has forced us to define more closely the goals and ambitions of the datasets policy which the ISC is now funding. It is now clear that support for the creation and maintenance of a European information industry is one factor to consider, which implies an unwillingness to accept the BL position of uncritical acceptance of U.S. standards and priorities. Equally, it is clear that networking futures will have to be developed a[art from the British Library, whose studied parsimony guided by ambiguity of policy would otherwise act as an unacceptable brake on networking developments.
UKOLN has been much involved in setting up the BIC/UBIS/CBM-UKOLN alliance called the Triad. BIC or Book Industry Communication grew out of the work on EDI standards. UBIS, or Users of Book Industry Standards is the old MARC User Group, while CBM-UKOLN is the bringing together of the Centre for Bibliographic Management and the U.K. Office for Library Networking. These three have begun to develop a sort of coalition to look at common issues and problems essentially centred on machine transferable data relating to publishing. Most of us underestimate the sheer quantity of material available in machine-readable form. For example, the Gutenberg Project at the University of Illinois aims to make available ten thousand of the most used texts over the next few years.3 Some one thousand of the items are already in various stages of preparation. Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are, of course, available, while the Dante project aims to cover critical commentaries as well as the poet’s texts. Nor are these isolated examples. A recent article recorded three hundred such projects in some thirty countries.4 McGraw-Hill has begun an experiment in the United States which is a form of customised publishing.5 Teachers can select any items or parts of items from the McGraw-Hill list and even add their own unpublished material and a tailored textbook will be produced with print-runs as short as thirty. This has technical library implications for things like ISBNs and copyright, but more importantly it emphasises the point that material will increasingly be user specified rather than publisher specified. Some thirty refereed electronic journals already exist, while the Online Journal of Clinical Trials is an ambitious experiment designed specifically for online access, making it very different from a traditional printed journal in quite fundamental ways. Thus, the journal is no longer driven by time, with the frequency of issues dictating how and when articles are published. They are simply added to the database when approved, on a continuous cycle. The journal constantly grows in size as “old” articles are not removed; indeed subscribers are encouraged to add annotations or rebuttals as appendices to articles but it remains to be seen whether this will work in practice. The entire journal can be accessed by text, paragraph, page reference, table and so on, and formatted for paper output. Every subscriber can be notified of additions to the database since the last logon or can restrict that to specific subject areas. Then there is the sheer volume of data. In September 1991 NASA began to collect data for a project called Mission to Planet Earth. A group of satellites when in full commission will transfer tens of terabytes of data to earth every day. This has had or will have a dramatic effect on the way in which information will be made available to scholars and teachers.
Lastly, in terms of library to publisher links, I would like to touch on the importance of standards such as EDIFACT, already covered in detail by Malcolm Peters (earlier in this book). But their significance bears repeating. These standards are created for other groups or are generic standards, but as information is increasingly transmitted rather than possessed it is vital that we influence the design of standards and work with groups such as BIC in order to do so.
Let me then close by trying to pull together a few of these themes. Just in time, not just in case is another way of saying access not holdings strategies. Equally important is perhaps the idea that the virtual library can be created by an individual and not by people like us. The individual will have the power to use or buy services right across the network. Secondly, and a little surprisingly, there is a convergence of policy and practice. Major funding bodies are interested in significant policy steps which will facilitate the new world which is being created. Money is being found for SuperJANET, for datasets, for library initiatives and the thrust is clear. At the UC&R Conference last week Louis Klee6 perceptively commented that finding money for higher education was actually not difficult. What was difficult was finding the idea which unlocked the purse. The nexus of change in higher education, the opening up of JANET to many communities and the provision of our information superhighway is providing the idea which allows policy and practice to race ahead together.
Wherever two or three librarians are gathered together in any country, they will complain about the national library. Even allowing for this, the marginalisation of the British Library is a significant event which should not remain unexamined. It is not too late for a change in this situation but planning will go ahead on the basis that the BL is a follower not a leader.
Finally, new forms of scholarly communication will force a whole new set of patterns and relationships to develop between the research, publishing and library communities. Roles are changing and blurring and it will be more than interesting to see how they develop. These developments will go ahead. How they go ahead will in some measure depend on funding patterns and how we manage them – but that is a topic for Harry East (later in this book).
NOTES
1. 1. Miller, Alan. (1992) The ISC/Computer Board – Past, present and future. Lecture to the IUCC Management Conference, York. [To be published in the Conference Proceedings].
2. 2. Stone, Peter. (1992) JANET: the educational and research network of the United Kingdom. In: Flanders, B. & Zuck, G. Wide Area Networks and Library Services. Westport, CT: Meckler
3. 3. Hart, Michael S. (1990) Project Gutenberg: access to electronic texts. Database 13:7.
4. 4. Billings, Harold. (1991) The bionic library. Library Journal 116, October: 40.
5. 5. Miller, Michael. (1990) Professors Customize Textbooks, Blurring Roles of Publisher, Seller and Copy Shop. Wall Street Journal pB1 (August 16, 1990).
6. 6. Klee, Louis. (1992) La course du lievre a travers champs, ou comment trouver des financements pour la Bibliotheque Universitaire. Paper given at the UC&R Conference, Aberdeen.