Mapping the future of research libraries

Derek Law, Director of Information Strategy, University of Strathclyde

Good afternoon everyone. I very much regret that I cannot be with you today. After I had accepted the invitation to speak, my university set this afternoon as the time for the annual meeting for the review and regrading of information services staff. It seemed impossible to neglect this. The organisers of the conference were kind enough to suggest that rather than find a different speaker, my long-distance participation would be preferred and so I appear before you as the ghost in the machine. But perhaps this unfortunate change of plan allows me to make my first point. Research libraries have always been international, but we can see that their future is to be global. Technology allows us to send and receive information instantly and comprehensively. What have been relatively simple problems of cataloguing, classification, preservation and access become enormously larger and more sophisticated and will call on all our profession al skills. Higher Education has developed the concept of the Distributed National Electronic Collection and it is there that I believe our future lies - and lies in cross-sectoral distribution rather than in the airtight walls of the sectoral libraries that we have tended to operate in.

At present we have a government which seems set for at least two terms in office and one who’s mantra is “education, education, education”. This is a good time to be considering how we map the future of rearch collections in all media.

Powerful Networks: We have put in place or are planning a series of networks for different sectors

n JANET for Higher Education

n NHSNet for the Health Service

n National Grid for Learning for Schools

n University for Industry for Lifelong Learning

n The People’s Network for Public Libraries

n Metropolitan Area Networks for everyone (?)

Thanks to Ministry turf wars and Treasury miserliness these are being planned both nationally and cheaply. It is the equivalent of building six light railways from London to York rather than one major new route. Fortunately a combination of the relaxed connection policy for Metropolitan Area Networks and the ambition of some local authorities, a degree of integration will happen in at least some parts of the country, where broadband networks will be put in place. We need to press for this if we are to be able to distribute images and multimedia. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an MPEG file takes forever to load.

The Funding Environment: For the first time in many years the funding environment is also conducive to a major development of research activity. The government has already allocated some £50 million pounds for the creation of content for the People’s Network. We may expect a flowering of the digitisation of local history records. Nor need we think of this as purely local history in the accepted sense. There is no reason why such material should not include everything from community information to hospital and social services records. The Heritage Lottery Fund/New Opportunities Fund also provides a potentially rich source of funding for content creation. In Higher Education the Research Support Libraries programme has several tens of millions to support cataloguing, access, cross-sectoral co-operation and digitisation. This follows on from the successful post-Follett report activities which created perhaps one hundred million pounds worth of electronic library developments. The large-scale funding of research infrastructure by the research councils also has the potential to be exploited by the fleet of foot who want to create a base of research materials. The management of electronic datasets has long been a concern of the Economic & Social Research Council for example. Also in the public sector we may expect to see the new Regional Development Agencies becoming powers in the land. They will have substantial budgets matched by those of the new governing bodies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They are to be encouraged to have cultural and heritage policies and again we should be pressing for a liberal interpretation of what that means. Programmes such as SCRAN in Scotland have already shown what powerful multimedia resources can be created. The Digital Libraries Programme in the United States has a major international component in its second phase. As interestingly it has recognised that large scale content creation is a necessary prerequisite for the major uptake of digital libraries. To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s famous election slogan, “It’s the content stupid”

Libraries & Information Commission:

The Libraries and Information has from its inception been a staunch advocate of cross-sectoral approaches to library provision and its National Research Strategy reflects this. As it moves towards the development of a National Information Policy we may expect to see it spending at least some of its limited funds in prosecuting this ambition. In fact so successful has it been that its role is to expand into cross-domain activities. Formally it is to merge with the Museums and Galleries Commission to create the new Museums, Libraries and Archives Commission, but in practice we may suppose that it is the dynamism of the former which has encouraged government to propose the change. It is also interesting that perhaps for the first time, the use of the word “archives” in the title of an NGO represents a significant recognition of the role of archives and archivists, hitherto the Cinderellas of the information world.

The National Libraries: The role of the national libraries is an important one here and there are welcome signs of imaginative thinking. The British Library has clearly recognised the importance of content, even if its recent attempt at a PFI deal has failed. It is some time since arrangements were made with the other legal deposit libraries to share the work of cataloguing. More recently some discussion has begun with the public libraries on sharing responsibility for the acquisition of local material. Electronic legal deposit is also firmly on the agenda. Now that the British Library has rid itself of the succubus of the planning of the new Saint Pancras building, we may except it to reassert its proper place as the major research library in the UK. However in the new environment which is emerging its role must change to one of co-ordinating a massively decentralised system rather than being the dominant force in the land.

Access: A key element in the future map of research libraries is that of access. This is massively enhanced by electronic networks. Quite apart from the removal of the fear of the “swamp factor” described by Bernard Naylor, the opportunity to move the content to the reader rather than the reader to the content opens up massive potential for resource sharing on a hitherto undreamed of scale. We know that the creation of electronic catalogue records leads to a growth in physical use of collections and can confidently expect the same to happen to digital content. However digitisation should be seen at this stage as an access surrogate rather than as a preservation medium. The major research collections remain unconvinced by the zealots that the technology is sufficiently robust for long-term preservation. Microform remains the preferred preservation medium. But perhaps the greatest beneficiary of digitisation will be in the use of still and moving images. Almost by accident Higher Education’s so-called Non-Formula Funding Programme for the Humanities placed substantial funding into the Regional Film Archives and this seems likely to be resource of great significance for social commentary. Another highlight of this programme, which seems likely to be continued by the RSLP, is the development of a national archives server. It is broadly evident where major subject collections of books will lie, but almost impossible to make an intuitive guess as to where archive material may be found. The creation of a single entry point which gives high level descriptions of archive collections should greatly facilitate access to what hitherto have been little known specialised collections. In sum then the use of networks will improve access to the riches of the resource base scattered throughout the country’s library and archive collections. We can increasingly see that coherence will be brought to the fragmented information base which we possess.

Cataloguing: Standards have always lain at the core of what we do. The description and recording of what we possess has been as sacred as the Ark of the Covenant to the profession. If the centrality of that activity has diminished in recent years with the sharing of records becoming an increasingly clerical activity, it is set to return to the heart of our professional concerns as we consider the uncontrolled anarchy of the Internet. Standards must again concern us. Here a great deal of work and experimentation is going on. The Dublin Core is, of course the major international development, but in the UK projects such as OMNI and the Arts & Humanities Data Service have begun to explore integrated access to decentralised provision. The MODELS standards promoted by UKOLN at Bath and the concept of clumps and hybrid libraries pioneered by JISC’s Committee on Electronic Information have opened up new areas of standards works which we need to resolve to ensure interoperability.

Two recent reports by Philip Bryant have highlighted the remaining large task of retroconversion of special collections. Much of that work relates to special collections belonging to organisations which either do not see the need for such work or who cannot afford to fund it. Again if we are to ensure ready access to research colections we have not only to map them but to convert the records which will provide access to researchers.

Again in the area of standards we see the need for co-operation, co-ordination and the need for a total review of the research materials available in the UK.

Preservation: A corollary of this emphasis on co-ordination may be found in the area of preservation. A much wider range of players is now involved in the preservation of research materials. Much of the technology for preservation can be expensive and again the message to be sent is one of co-operation and sharing. Again Higher Education has marked the way by setting up a national centre at the University of Hertfordshire. In the same vein, the National Preservation Office has become a centre funded by different parts of the community. We can see here that issues of standards as well as preservation itself are better treated as common concerns.

Electronic materials: Let me turn finally to what Cliff Lynch of the Coalition for networked Information has called endangered content. This now ranges from e-mail to the contents of hard disks to experimental records and administrative records. The history of science and medicine is no longer paper bound but we appear to be making no concerted effort to address this issue. It seems to me quite possible that the scientific history of the 1990’s could largely disappear from the record unless these issues begin to be addressed by the academy as well as by librarians and archivists. This is perhaps best evidenced by what might be seen as the somewhat irresponsible attitude of organisations to electronic content. Many organisations have significant paper records management systems in place but it is extremely rare to find any such similar system for electronic material. The CATRIONA project based at Strathclyde has demonstrated both that organisations make no attempt to discover and manage the intellectual property created electronically by staff and that such management requires a significant level of professional information management skills. It is a rare institution indeed which has in place intellectual property rights agreements with its staff. Librarians have raised this issue in terms of research with frequent but ineffectual regularity in recent years. It is then ironic that it is the cost of creating teaching materials on the world wide web which may finally force organisations to act on this issue. It is perhaps the archiving of electronic material which worries me most. Thanks to such bodies as the Data Archive at Essex University we now have a clear understanding of the long-term issues in play here. Basically these are two. Refreshing data is technically complicated and it is also very expensive.

The Library Paradigm: Historically, organisations have not lined up their members or users at the start of the year, offered them all say a hundred pounds and suggested that the individual then be responsible for their own information needs, for which the organisation abdicates all responsibility. More typically they set up a library. The organisation identifies its information needs and matching resources. It acquires these and collects them in one place called a library where they are managed, classified and preserved by information professionals. Arrangements are then set up to gain access to the information which cannot be held locally and is called document delivery. The same model works perfectly well in an electronic environment. Either an Intranet or a Metropolitan Area Network becomes the analogue of the library and information is acquired, mirrored or cached and held locally. This improves connectivity and allows issues of classification and preservation to be addressed and controlled by local professionals. This can be illustrated by comparing old and new activities.

Conclusion: At a time of transition mapping what faces us is a simple but sensible approach. The potential of the new technologies opens up hitherto undreamt of avenues of scholarship. By the same token it requires some redefinition of the process of scholarly communication. Whether or not we have a role in that is questionable. What we must certainly attempt to do is to take the increasingly fragmented records of scholarship and bind them in to an infrastructure which is global in reach but local in delivery