98Metropolitan
Metropolitan Area Networks and the Future of Networking in the United Kingdom*
D. G. Law
King's College London
London WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom
I. Introduction
Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) are a sufficiently recent development that they may need some explanation (Kahn, 1996). Regrettably the definition of a MAN remains rather imprecise. In the United Kingdom they are regional/local networks set up by the Joint Information Systems Committee1 (JISC)
of the Higher Education Funding Councils,2 with a management contract awarded to a local university. The MAN falls somewhere between a Local Area Network (LAN), which uses high-speed links to connect buildings that are close together (typically under 10 km) and usually form part of the same organization, and a Wide Area Network (WAN), which links different management domains independent of geography and at much slower speeds. A MAN aims to serve a geographic area beyond the scope of LAN technologies but is restricted by some well-defined community of interest, often a
city and its surroundings. The MAN will provide interconnection between different sites of the same organization - and the typical British university is now a multicampus undertaking—as well as interconnecting different organization. Despite the name, MANs can link non-metropolitan areas and thus have the potential to cover the whole United Kingdom. An early and typical regional MAN is FaTMAN (Fife and Tayside Metropolitan Area Network), covering a mixture of rural and urban areas. The largest population centre - Dundee - has a population of only 250,000 people. When set up in 1995, FaTMAN linked three universities - Abertay, Dundee, and St. Andrews - and was joined by the Northern College in 1996. The total length of the initial fiber optic network was nearly 48 km, with the link from Dundee to St. Andrews alone being 23 km. The data transfer rate is 155 Mb/sec, and it uses asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology. Although it does not yet link institutions from other sectors, it clearly has the capacity to offer high-speed data links outside urban areas.
II. MANs and Cross-Sectoral Networking
The exploration of the use of networks by libraries has hitherto been almost exclusively driven by higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom. This is partly due to accidents of funding and timing, but there is a clear and well-founded perception that HE has been reluctant to share either its experiences
or its networks with other library sectors. In large measure this has been due to the Acceptable Use Policy, which guides the management and provision of the Joint Academic Network (JANET). JANET was set up in the mid-1980s to link all universities and it and its successor SuperJANET form the university and research network in the United Kingdom. The Acceptable Use Policy (http://www.ja.net/documents/use.html) has long been seen as either a defence for research or a barrier to cross-sectoral development, according to one's point of view. The policy states that "JANET is maintained to support teaching, learning and research. Only organisations whose predominant use of JANET falls into these categories, or whose use is approved by the JISC, will be permitted to make a connection." In particular this has been taken to exclude connection to public libraries, health service networks, and until very recently to schools. This may be compared with the Acceptable Use Policy for FaTMAN, which states that "FaTMAN is primarily maintained to support academic and related activities such as teaching, learning and research". (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/ITServices/fatman/aup.htm) This is clearly much more open in its approach and allows for almost any organization to join. At the least one might expect that links can be opened to further education colleges3, schools, public libraries, and the National Health Service, all of which have proved contentious areas under the JANET policy. There is little evidence that any of the MANs are taking advantage of this new freedom so far. An understandable caution has led to a concentration on connecting existing HE establishments and providing applications closely linked to HE needs. But in principle, any organization can "join" the MANs, subject to locally determined rules. This radical, if somewhat accidental shift of policy, offers MANs the opportunity to develop a central role in the growing range of national initiatives, which assume that what the Dearing Report4 calls Communications and Information Technology (C&IT) will be central to the development of any enterprise. Networks have, of course, existed in other sectors, but with a much narrower purpose or with much poorer funding. For example LANs were and are concerned with the administration and financial control of the parent body and by extension with the administration of the library service, rather than with the sharing of information. Similarly National Health Service networks are concerned principally with patient administration, which in part explains an obsession with secrecy on grounds of patient confidentiality. This leads to an inability to support interorganizational networking. Coupled with the introversion of HE, this led to many librarians misunderstanding the possibilities offered by networking. For too many libraries the goal became an Internet connection and a CompuServe or AOL account. The Internet became librarians equivalent of the cargo cults of Melanesia, which believe that the aping of Western society will bring material wealth or cargo. In the case of libraries the simple possession of Internet access is confused with the provision of an information service. A survey (Ormes and Dempsey, 1995) showed that only a handful of public libraries had Internet access. That has changed in recent months. The most publicized developments have come in public libraries, where Project Earl has offered a notable leadership role (Kilgour, 1996) since 1995. One good example of this is the development of "Ask a Librarian" (http://www.earl.org.uk/ask/index.html) a consortially based reference service somewhat akin to the U.S.-based Stumpers bulletin board for reference librarians. The advent of the Library and Information Commission, which is strongly committed to the advantages of cross-sectoral linkages has also begun to focus attention on such infrastructural prerequisites as digitization (Parry, 1997).
III. The National Scene
The potential for developing MANs has been evident since their inception (Law, 1996). But the perhaps theoretical ambitions of advocates of a UK national networking policy have been sharpened and overtaken by the election of a new government that is aware of and supportive of the opportunities for the United Kingdom to be a leader in creating and shaping the information society. Networking in the United Kingdom is at a crossroads. A major network— JANET—exists for higher education. The government has announced three major new initiatives: the National Grid for Learning (Department for Employment and Education, 1997a), which will link all schools; the University for Industry, which will provide post-16 training linked to employment; and the People's Network for Public Libraries (Library and Information Commission, 1997). At the same time the Fryer Report (National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, 1997) sees a continuum of lifelong learning that will require access to information from a variety of sources. A further report on the 2 5 school and college experiments constituting the Superhighway Initiative talks of the need "to organise the groupings of all schools into neighbourhood clusters" and to "encourage and support links between the schools and other local partners such as . . . libraries and colleges" (Department for Employment and Education, 1997b). These could operate as a series of separately planned and no doubt effective initiatives. However, the potential for bringing these activities together through the MANs is very real. The government is committed to regionally based politics and the MANs could provide a very elegant realization of a political ambition.
IV. MANs and the Internet: A Proposed Model
Anyone using the Internet in Europe knows that the United States ceases to exist in the afternoon. Although it may be technically possible to expand bandwidth to meet the desired capacity, there must be doubt as to whether this is either economic or effective. If it is far too early to predict the implosion
of the Internet under its own weight, we can at least see different models beginning to emerge of how it can be made effective at the local level. When considering the potential of the MAN it is instructive to consider the library as a paradigm for network content. What organizations do not do is to give every member a sum of money to be spent as they wish on data resources of more or less relevance to the mission of the parent body. What they have historically done is to employ information professionals to assemble a local collection that meets most of the day-to-day information needs of the organization and provides a back-up facility to provide that expensive, rarer or peripheral material that is needed from time to time (the interlibrary loan system). The prospect of the introduction of charges by JISC is beginning to concentrate thinking on the cost effectiveness of general Internet access in higher education. Quite apart from the telecommunications charges, use of the Internet is resource intensive in academic staff time spent finding data in an inadequately classified set of resources and in the inefficiencies that poor connectivity brings. The existing library model then elegantly transfers to the local networked environment. Although this might be considered to work for the fashionable intranet, it also applies to the closed grouping of a MAN.
Library tasks Internet tasks
Acquisition Resource discovery
Collection building Local server farms
Classification Knowledge management
Preservation Long-term data sinks
User instruction User instruction
This implies that MANs will have to begin developing views on such traditional areas as what in libraries would be called acquisitions policy. One of the best examples of this is the agreement of the University of Glasgow to host the Visible Human Data Set created by the National Library of Medicine. This is an image bank of growing importance to those involved in medical education. Initially the data was held only in the United States and it was ruinously expensive of bandwidth repeatedly to transfer—or often to attempt to transfer—the same image across the Atlantic Ocean. After a great deal of negotiation the National Library of Medicine agreed that a mirror site could be set up in the United Kingdom. One issue, which this acquisition opened, remains unresolved, users will require some explicit or implicit assurance on data quality, yet there are no nationally or internationally agreed-upon guidelines or standards for running mirror sites. At the moment each dataset host has independently to negotiate the terms and conditions of mirroring to protect their product. Since no MAN, as no library, would be able to meet the entirety of its community's data needs, provision will have to be made for the management of access to external data. Cacheing strategies are now relatively well understood and these too would form a significant plank of a MAN data strategy. In essence the cache works on the old library saw that the material most likely to be used tomorrow is the material used today. A computer cache then simply holds copies of the material taken by users from other networks for a specified period of time such as a week. All subsequent requests for data are pointed first at the cache before going outside the local network. Experiments in the United Kingdom at the University of Kent have shown that this makes dramatic savings in the need for international connections.
A. Acting Together to Meet Common Needs
Local information plans were created in an attempt to harness the cross-sectoral library resources of a region. MANs provide the opportunity to take a step beyond that and in addition to develop, increase, and make more available the resources of the region. An initial if scarcely original list demonstrates the sort of cross-sectoral activity, which is ideally suited to a MAN.
1. Some Library Needs
Shared catalogues
Improved document delivery
Shared collections
Shared digitization and purchase
Shared archiving and storage
Shared services
The 24-hour enquiry desk and teleworking
Improved access to resources without compromising physical security
2. Institutional Common Needs
It takes little effort to work out that the range of potential benefits from the MAN stretch across the organization as a whole and not just the library. It has been shown that higher education can contribute as much as 10% of the local economy, and this is reflected in a whole range of relationships with the local community, all of which could be improved through a shared network
• Student accommodation and some student supports is often linked to local authorities.
• Higher education has a large and active estate. Planning applications and related estates matters also link to local authorities.
• Electronic mail, diaries, and documents would facilitate the meetings that link schools, hospitals, local authorities, and industry.
• Most universities are now active in the health sector. Health care of students and staff as well as links to hospital trusts and the regional health authorities would be facilitated.
• Cross-domain links are becoming as important as cross-sectoral links. Work with museums, galleries, and archives, all with different curatorial traditions and a richness of media content, are to be encouraged and will be facilitated over MANs.
• Links to schools and further education colleges are inevitable as government policy increasingly regards education as a lifelong continuum of experience.
But the benefits are not exclusive to higher education:
• Information services for SMEs5
• Videoconferencing for any set of members
• School and other student access to expensive university resources
• Presentation of cultural and heritage materials to the community at large
Such listings are neither exhaustive nor particularly original. Inevitably the growth of activity on MANs will develop from existing activities, but they will surely be strongest where local community-based services offer efficiency, effectiveness, and cost-benefit.
B. The London MAN and an Experiment in Developing Cross-Sectoral Activity
A specific proposal is being developed in the London area that aims to take forward cross-sectoral activity on the London MAN. Since the London MAN is potentially the largest in the country, covering 20% of HE institutions; for example, the initial project is concentrated in inner London, which contains a very rich mix of cultural, heritage, and educational organizations. The participants want to develop a platform where the general arguments in favour of MAN-based development can be given specificity. The British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC) Digital Libraries Programme has awarded a consortium of London public library authorities (City of Westminster, Corporation of London, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea) an award of £26,750 for a 4-month feasibility study into establishing a pilot project that will take a selection of London public libraries on to the London MAN. The hope is that by focusing on the common ground of heritage and cultural activities clear benefit can be shown to all parties. LASER6 is the project coordinator and consultant to the project. The project steering committee has representatives from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the University of London, the M25 Consortium of Higher Education Libraries,7 the London 'MAN,' the participant public library authorities, a London Museum, and LASER.
This broad-based grouping demonstrates that a wider perspective is beginning to develop. The scoping study, which is of four months' duration, will:
• Establish the detailed technical and networking configurations required by public libraries to become connected to the London MAN.
• Identify the capital and recurrent cost of the technical/networking and service components of a future pilot.
• Seek areas for collaboration/and or cross-domain developments with other departments within the local authority, the higher education sector in London, and other sectors such as museums, galleries, archives, business information, and the voluntary sector.
• Establish the feasibility, means, and time scale for developing and offering, sharing, and participating in all services on the London MAN.
• Show how public library participation in the London MAN and proposals for cross-sector developments might assist the recommendations for improving the services overall, assist the coordination/collaboration of London public library authorities, and the greater coordination of library and information services in London.
• Identify how the proposed pilot will be financed.
• Compare the situation and requirements of London public libraries in relation to the MAN with related developments in other parts of the United Kingdom.
• Evaluate how a pilot project in this area will provide input to policy and strategic discussion within London and at national level.
All of the partners are committed to cross-sectoral activity and perceive great potential in developing a London-based project that will show this.
V. Conclusion
The political climate in the United Kingdom is poised for a great strengthening of regional developments and initiatives. Separate Parliaments for England and Wales, the so-called Council of the Isles to link Northern Ireland and Eire with the mainland, and the growth of the Regional Development Agencies in England are all proposals actively promoted by the new government. At the same time the government seems prepared to contemplate a massive investment in networks as an essential element of infrastructure in creating an information society developing an information economy. Taken together the two factors suggest that regionally based cross-sectoral initiatives have the potential to deliver both great benefits to the participants and the new political orthodoxy.
References
Department for Education and Employment (1997a). Connecting the Learning Society: National Grid for Learning. (The Government's Consultation Paper.) London, DfEE. (http://www.open.gov.uk/dfee/grid/index.htm)
Department for Education and Employment (1997b). Preparing for the Information Age: Synoptic Report of the Education Departments' Superhighways Initiative. London, DfEE. (http://www.open.gov.uk/dfee/dfeehome.htm)
Kahn, M. (1996, October). The Development of the London MAN. Unpublished paper, University of London Computing Centre, London.
Kilgour, A. (1996). Interface: EARL. Ariadne 5. (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue5/interface/intro.html)
Law, D. (1996). A MAN for all reasons? Ariadne 2. (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue2/derek/intro.html)
Library and Information Commission. (1997). New Library: The People's Network. London, Library and Information Commission.
National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning. (1997). Learning for the Twenty-First Century: First Report of the National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (the Fryer Report). London, Department for Education and Employment.
Ormes, S., and Dempsey, L. (1995, December 20). Library and Information Commission Public Library Internet Survey, Version 1.0. UKOLN Report for the Library and Information Commission. (http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/publib/lic.html)
Parry, D. (1997). A Review of Digitisation Projects in Local Authority Libraries & Archives. Final Report to the Library & Information Commission. Newcastle, Information North.
Notes
* This article is an expansion of a paper first presented at the Public Library Authorities Conference at Torquay in September 1997.
1. The Higher Education Funding Councils (see Note 2 below) recognize that some activities have to be carried out as a national level rather than in each of the countries forming the United Kingdom. These functions, such as networking and national information services, are then managed by Joint Committees of the Funding Councils. JISC is one such committee.
2. State support for British universities is allocated by the Higher Education Funding Councils. The councils consist of government nominees from business, education, and public life and each has a permanent secretariat. There are four of these bodies, one for each of the constituent countries of the United Kingdom.
3. Further Education Colleges in the United Kingdom offer predominantly sub-degree courses, often of a vocational nature. In some cases a few degree courses are offered.
4. The Dearing Report is the result of an enquiry into the future of higher education by a commission chaired by Sir Ron Dearing and was published in late 1997.
5. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is a term much favoured by the European Union. In this context it refers to those businesses that are too small to have their own in-house information service.
6. LASER (London and South East Region) began life as one of the regional interlending co-operatives in the United Kingdom. It has grown and expanded its portfolio of activities into many other areas of information provision. While hardly an OCLC in embryo, it shares many of the same ambitions and attributes, albeit in a much smaller geographic area.
7. The M25 is the motorway circling London, roughly equivalent to the Beltway in Washington, DC. The consortium links all the higher education libraries within the circle.