96SCECSAL

Bridges to the Past - Gateways to the Future

By Derek Law

Libraries throughout the world are at many stages of development, but meetings such as this SCECSAL meeting allow us all the chance to look up from the problems on our desks and to contemplate the horizon and the way ahead. My theme is that of change, change in the global environment in which we operate, the challenges which we face as a result and to consider how we can mould and shape our future. In his vote of thanks to the Minister, Ralph Masanjika talked of professional commitment and this conference is a perfect expression of such commitment. To make long and difficult journeys and sacrifices to get here to Maseru implies professional commitment of a high order and I hope that the same commitment will be taken away by us all to implement the resolutions of the meeting. Some of the issues I wish to discuss may seem very distant or very starry-eyed, but I hope you will find some of it practical. The Information Age had attracted the attention of governments throughout the world. One of our tasks is to ensure that all levels of government and institutional management are reminded that they already have a cadre of skilled professionals equipped to deal with the issues of that Information Age. The G7 Group has commissioned work in this area, while Thabo Mbeki has spoken eloquently of the need not to create a divide between the information rich and information poor. The best way to shape our tomorrow is to consider it today.

The spread of networking has been as rapid as it has been unforeseen. Now we are commonly assumed to be entering the third great age of mankind – the information age, following the agricultural and industrial ages. Ten years ago the Internet did not exist. Now users are being added at phenomenal rates. The growth rate is the fastest known for any technology and Paul Evan Peters has called it the greatest migration in human history. - Only the telephone has ever approached it. The number of Internet users was 39 million in October 1995 and 42 million in January 1996 and will be fifty million in January 1997. Ten million computer nodes are linked to the Internet. Each node has an unknown number of computers on its sub-network. At current growth rates there will be more computers than people in the world by 2003. This is not quite as silly as it sounds. Modern hotel doors all have microchips linked to central servers; burglar alarms may be linked to a central computer, bank "holes in the wall" have microchips and so on. Many of these nodes act as servers. They contain information of hugely varying quality from the academic to propaganda and disinformation as well as information which is simply wrong.

At the same time one can sense the paradigm of scholarly communication is changing. The collaboratory has arrived. Over the last five years the number of multi-authored papers with authors from more than one country has risen from 10% to 25 % of those listed in Science Citation Index. Working methods are changing. In the physical sciences there does seem to be firm evidence that in at least physics, mathematics and computing the game has shifted. The same appears to be true in some areas of medical research. Papers are written, circulated, discussed and modified and the discipline moves on. Electronic mail has brought in a dreadful but eloquent phrase "mission critical" to most researchers. List servers have become a common method of developing discussions for a discipline. It was very encouraging to learn at the SCANUL-ECS pre-conference meeting that one is planned for the SCECSAL region.

The Internet is a world in chaos and most traditional publishers find it very difficult to deal with. Publishing itself is in chaos with all sorts of people now moving into the arena. Bill Gates now says that Microsoft is a publisher rather than a software house. Big multi-national corporations such as that of Rupert Murdoch are creating multimedia information conglomerates. At the same time anyone with a pc and a network connection can publish information on the network. Conventional publication has markers. The imprint Oxford University Press implies something about quality. The homepage network address OXFORD.AC.UK implies a range of possibilities from a university press to a student bedroom. But when everything is available without these markers, selection by the user becomes more of a problem.

A recent report from Reuters Business Information has identified a new disease, The study showed that one in four managers suffer ill-health because of the amount of information they must handle. About 50% agree that high levels of business information are nonetheless required for them to perform effectively. 48% felt that the Internet will play a primary role in exacerbating the problem in the next two years. The result is Information Fatigue Syndrome. It results in procrastination, in delaying business decisions and distraction from the main responsibilities of managers as they try to come to terms with an overload of information. Interestingly, this is then a disease which information professionals rather than medical professionals can cure. Where the supply of information exceeds the demand, those who can filter, package and add value to that information will be of growing value to society. To paraphrase the great library teacher Ranganathan we need to supply the right information to the right person at the right time.

So what is missing from the Internet and what can we as information professionals supply?

• Provenance and Imprimatur

This has been the traditional domain of the publisher. We have been used to a stable, print-based world where once something is published it cannot change. Publishers provide editorial quality and use peer review processes to ensure a stable product of known worth. Documents on the Internet are very different. They are subject to change; they come in many versions, they may be duplicated at many sites and may have been subtly changed; they appear and disappear as the computer manager loses interest or changes a machine. It is probably not our role to take control of this area, but we do have a legitimate interest in representing what will be good and acceptable practice. Bodies such as SCECSAL and IFLA will have a role to play in representing our views.

• Organisation of knowledge

The view of current users was recently and eloquently described by David Bouchier, an American academic and avowed technophobe. He noted that:

From time to time I venture into the howling wastes of the Internet. The technocrats promise is that this information overload will increase a thousand times, ten thousand times until every suburban home will have access to every piece of useless information in the universe.

The Internet lacks any organisation. The response of computer scientists has been to create very powerful (but very stupid) search engines called "web crawlers". Do we really believe that web crawlers can replace out intellectual judgement? Managing and making accessible the resources of the Internet is a huge professional challenge and thus far I have to say that I see only very limited signs that out profession is getting to grips with the issues - and yet the organisation of knowledge is one of our traditional domains.

So how do we face the challenges of this new environment? Firstly, by acknowledging the change. As Thomas Carlyle said of the lady who wrote to him saying that she accepted the universe "By God, she'd better". We can then move to reconsider what are our core professional competences. I would argue that these are the three "S's": selection, storage and support. These are simply old wine in new bottles. Our fundamental professional skills are in the management of information and this does not depend on the medium in which it is presented. Libraries have existed for four thousand years, computers for barely forty. We have survived such changes before and no doubt will again. I find it comforting to imagine a group such as this meeting perhaps three thousand years ago in the conference centre of the great library of Ashurbanipal contemplating the threat posed to tablets of stone by the emergence of the papyrus, or of the librarian monks in Rome meeting in the Scriptorium to contemplate the threat of printing to their manuscripts. To repeat; our skills lie in the organisation and management of information and the form in which it is conveyed is incidental.

Selection:

Although the decision to acquire or access information is in many ways independent of the medium, electronic texts raise a new set of issues. How do we define the original and uncorrupted text? How do we define the status of the latest and intermediate texts? The quantity of misinformation on the Internet has already been mentioned. It is a literally deadly problem for those involved in areas such as health information. Do we distinguish between supported resources and unsupported resources? It is now virtually an article of professional faith that we shall move from holdings to access strategies. How are we to manage that? Do we begin to catalogue the things we don't have rather than the things we do? Where web pages are set up, are these all to be managed at local level or do we need national subject based initiatives?

Related to this comes quality assurance. This is an implicit but rarely stated part of stock selection, for of course we acquire only what is perceived to be relevant and of value. I have already touched on one aspect of that in terms of defining what is either the latest or the master version of an electronic publication. Electronic publications are much more susceptible to corruption since it is quite difficult to tell from where they originate and whether and when they have been changed either accidentally or by design.

Storage:

We have come to rely on a system where libraries form overt or implicit networks to retain and store the published record, or as much of it as we consider of value. Very little thought has yet been given to how this will be managed in an electronic era. We therefore need to revisit the much neglected areas of archiving and preservation where the range of issues is enormous. The record of research has tended to be preserved in the papers of researchers donated or bequeathed to archives. Who is consistently collecting the e-mail of Nobel prizewinners or the debates on bulletin boards which is where the scientific debate now takes place? We need to consider revivifying the University Presses and Learned Society Presses as a means of making scholarship properly available. We need to consider whether the creators of intellectual capital should set up a Copyright Licensing Agency in which we license limited rights to commercial publishers on our terms. We need to look at how we preserve the intellectual record of the academy. And I would argue that the responsibility is ours.

Implicit in storage is another classic information skill, the organisation of knowledge. It is only when one watches computer scientists struggling to reinvent what are effectively classification schemes that it becomes clear how sophisticated we are in this field. We should value this heritage and refocus on how it can be maintained and developed for electronic resources.

Support:

The third area of skills lies in the general area of user instruction and training in information skills. Although we and others have talked for quite some time about empowering end users, it is equally clear that users require to be helped to take the fullest advantage of that freedom. One of the dangers facing information professionals is the complacency of the satisfied inept. Most student users have, almost by definition, no learning curve since they are with us for a very short number of years.

Some of the trends in education suggest that we will see much greater emphasis on distance learning where again support and instruction becomes critical. There is a lot of experience which shows that the acquisition costs of electronic information are trivial compared with the ownership costs. It is the support, the instruction and the documentation which makes a difference. But we need to argue that loud and long. If electronic information is to change our profession at all I believe that it will be in this area. User support and instruction will play a much more central and prominent role in our lives. Libraries as physical places will be less important as users gain access from the desktop in their office (that said the social role of the library as a physical place must not be ignored), but library services in support of users, will increase in importance. We will be less guardians of books and more servants of users.

There is actually a fourth "S" - but it is one that we lack as a profession, Self-confidence. As we enter the Information Age, society will require information professionals. We need constantly to place ourselves in positions to remind those of influence that we exist, that we have the skills, that we can do the job. But we have to choose the path we follow. During the SCANUL pre-conference some of us were privileged to pay a visit to the eloquently named Help Me God Pass in the mountains, enjoying stunning views of the beautiful country of Lesotho. This journey used to take many hours, but now it takes about ninety minutes thanks to a brand new road driven into the mountains to help with the massive hydro-electric projects being undertaken by the government. Before the road arrived only a year or two ago, people moved around by horse and one still sees large numbers of these on the trip into the hills. These people now face a cultural dilemma which seemed to me a striking metaphor for the changes we have to consider. Think of libraries as stables and the new road not just as a highway but as an information superhighway. Will we cling to the culture of the horse or will we decide that our business is transport not horses and will we think of opening garages and body repair shops, of being the traffic policemen and ambulances on the highway? For be sure that if we do not others will. It is true that much may be lost in this shift of cultures, but new horizons will be opened. And not all need be lost. Just to conclude the metaphor, one of the stops we paid on our trip was to a pony-trekking centre where the traditional culture of the horse is retained and offered to everyone.

The American librarian Sheila Creth has proposed six areas where we should deploy our skills to best effect. These seem to me very apt.

· User Education through Outreach.

A recent article in The Economist called librarians the Navigators of the Information Age (but wondered if we knew it!). Others have used nouns such as Pilot or Guide. The label does not matter. I believe that we must expend much more effort in identifying user needs and undertaking user skills analysis to determine what services we should offer. The word "outreach" is also very important here. We can no longer count on a geographic monopoly which requires users to come to us. We must go to them.

· Knowledge Management

It is very easy to get information. Just sit in front of a television for twelve hours and you will be bombarded with information indiscriminately. What is much harder is to get the right information. The Internet also makes raw information much more readily available. Gaining knowledge is the most difficult thing of all. When the Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sports opened the conference he stressed the importance of packaging information so that it was "pertinent to the user". Whether teaching the skills of knowledge management, or acting as filters to provide discriminate rather than indiscriminate information, we have much to offer here.

· Organisation of Networked Resources

As a profession we too easily take for granted our major achievements in the organisation of knowledge, which have allowed relatively straightforward access to and sharing of resources internationally. MARC, ISBD's, cataloguing codes such as AACR2 are major achievements by any standards. We need similar levels of professional activity and commitment in the electronic arena.

· Information Policy Development

If we are indeed moving into an information age, information policy will be needed just as much as the energy or conservation or industrial policies of bodies in the industrial age. This will apply at all levels from the local to the international. We must make sure both that we are seen as stakeholders in contributing to such policies and that libraries are not overlooked as places relevant to such policies. As a small example, in the United Kingdom Prince Charles has recently proposed the creation of a national network of homework centres to help disadvantaged children. Now this is very worthy aim. But we already have a national network of homework centres in the shape of the public library. They may need more resources or different opening hours, but it would be a much more effective use of resources to build on what we have than to start from scratch. But the case must be made.

· Electronic Publishing

This is not necessarily an activity which we should undertake, although we may aspire to develop the sort of World Wide Web home pages developed in Namibia and Zambia. But we should have views and understanding to guide others and we should be equipped to lobby politicians and organizations on what we need from electronic publishing. The work of Paul Ginsparg and Stevan Harvard on pre-print archives suggest that cost savings of up to 80% may be possible over conventional publication. We then need to query why publishers are increasing prices. We need to be able to lobby over the outrageously restrictive WIPO copyright proposals which will seriously restrict resource sharing. We need to advise our Senates that copyright is just as much intellectual property as patents and that the best way to ensure the continued easy flow of information internationally is for universities and other bodies to retain at least electronic copyright and to grant publishers only limited licenses. We create the information as institutions. We have the right and the power to determine its distribution. Your libraries and institutions contain or create information which is of value regionally and internationally. Advising on its electronic publication and dissemination will be a service of great value.

· Strategic and Operational Planning

This is a grand phrase for a very simple idea. How can you tell if your library is succeeding or failing unless you know what you are trying to achieve? More importantly how will others know whether you are succeeding or failing if they do not know what you are trying to achieve? At its simplest this simply means writing down what you plan to do over say the next three years then listing the steps to achieving those goals. That way everyone will know all of this is the quality of the service. Quality is not a function of the amount of resources one has (although the task may be made easier with adequate resources. But however limited the resources they should be deployed effectively in pursuit of stated targets).

Having considered the threats and opportunities which face us we can then articulate a strategy which will take forward those concerns and set information professionals at the heart of the information age. The strategy outlined below is based on the draft vision statement of the UK's Libraries and Information Commission and aims to summarise pithily the skills and ambitions which we offer to society. I believe that it is more widely applicable.

A strategy for libraries

Libraries and librarians will concentrate on three core concerns:

connectivity - providing universal access to the products of the human mind. This may be seen to equate to IFLA's UDT core programme.

content - creating a digital library of materials required by information professionals for their users. This may be seen to equate to ILFA UAP and UBC core programmes.

competences - equipping individuals and organisations to play their full role in the information society. In the SCECSAL context this may be seen as relating to IFLA's ALP core programme.

These three core needs grow from a restatement of the core values of librarians, who:

• work with knowledge; add value by evaluating, making accessible, mediating, packaging and promoting knowledge;

• are the memory of society through collecting and preserving knowledge;

• form a substantial and growing sector of the economy;

• are necessary to the well-being of individuals, communities and society;

• reach into people's lives in many ways; people use a range of LIS throughout their lives and often use several different "libraries" at any one point in their lives;

• provide access to opportunities for lifelong learning; the knowledge which underpins all successful economic activity; the information which is central to a healthy and democratic society;

• empower the individual by providing resources and information for particular user groups and the information skills which are the essential coping skills for modern-day living;

• embody the value of collective activity; engender a sense of community within places and organisations; and provide a space where people can feel secure within a shared value system.

I am reluctant to use phrases for this such as "the library without walls" if only because a library without walls will find that the roof falls in. So let me settle for the conventional phrase of the virtual library. The future is going to be difficult, demanding and different, but the surest and best way of attacking and enjoying it is through the fruits of our professional disciplines and training, through their extension, development and renewal. We all belong to a profession with a proud past of service. That profession has a bright future, but that future lies in our hands. We cannot simply rest on the achievements of the past but must seek out and win a future as masters of the information universe.