I’m very grateful to Tim and Terry for the invitation to speak to you today. I had a long session with Terry two weeks ago when he took me to lunch and told me at length what you were trying to achieve. All I can say is that he may be boring, but his wallet’s in the right place.

I have become well known for delivering weighty pieces of nonsense to unsuspecting listeners. I’ve been asked to try both to provoke and worry you today, which relieves me of the need to do the weighty bit. What I’ve then done is to assemble a ragbag of facts and string them together in no discernible order. Although I hope to give you some impression of where I think the world is going, I also want to try and open up some of the questions which I think you should be addressing in your workgroup sessions. Now I understand that this is intended to be an iterative process so I thought I might begin with the chart some of you may know on project management. As you enter phase 1, you should be aware of the path you follow.

Phases of project management:

1. Enthusiasm

2. Disillusionment

3. Panic

4. Search for the Guilty

5. Punishment of the Inocent

6. Praise and honour for the non-participants

So let me just indicate the areas I want to cover over the next little while, always of course in the context of academic libraries, which is my home turf.

· The Internet

· The Information Chain

· Libraries

· Librarians

· The role of intermediaries

· The expectations of users

1. The Internet

I know that maths illiteracy affects eight out of every five people, but thought it worth rehearsing Internet growth rates. In the last year the number of reachable hosts on the Internet has grown from 3.2 million to 3.6 million. No one knows how many users are linked to each server. This is not a US phenomenon. Its share of servers is in steady decline and has reached 63%. In the last 90 days the number of servers linked in Latin America has grown by 36% and in Africa by 35%. In one area alone, World Wide Web traffic has captured 10% of the market within eighteen months. Its use is predicted to exceed telephone traffic within 3 years. And yet the Internet is a madhouse. The present state of the Internet was usefully described by A.J. Wright, in a comparison with a traditional library:

...the shelves have been removed...the materials lie in huge piles all over the building. The locks on the door have been changed, and there are vendors everywhere selling keys... you find the call numbers have been changed into a language system you do not understand. The OPAC terminals are gone, but there are voices everywhere --- you cannot see anyone --- talking about this or that guide. You pick up the first book you see and find that its contents have been transformed into language for which you will need a special translator. “Welcome to the virtual library” says the display.

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

From time to time I venture into the howling wastes of the Internet. The technocrats promise us 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.

Bringing order to that chaos is a huge challenge, not least because there is significant debate as to what the network actually is and does. There has been a recent trend to see it as a purely social phenomenon.”The Great Love Byte” proclaimed the Sunday Times last autumn, with a piece declaring that “Computer networks are the singles bars of the 1990’s”. Howard Rheingold in his new book “The Virtual Community” compares it to the corner bar - a sort of poor man’s version of “Cheers”. The Financial Times had a major spread on the topic last November already worrying about network traffic jams and complaining about the lack of catalogue and directory facilities. There is even a cartoon [slide]. Not perhaps as famous as the New Yorker’s “No one knows you’re a dog on the Internet”, but none the less showing that the concept has caught the public imagination. It almost sounds like the title of a Garth Brooks Country and Western Song. Special issues of Scientific American and features in popular magazines such as Byte all serve to spread the gospel.

2. The Information Chain

It has been claimed that knowledge is growing at a faster rate than even the global birth rate, which may explain why there are so many half wits. By and large the chain has worked well for a long time. Pieces of it have quietly changed in recent years in response to all sorts of pressures, not least financial and there is a need to reconsider roles. I believe that such testing will tend to make us reassert core professional values, whether in libraries, publishing or elsewhere, but the process is both serious and necessary. Just let me cite a few straws in the wind of change.

In the US Encyclopaedia sales have halved in the last 3 years. At the same time Microsoft has started giving away Encarta, expecting to make its money on the annual upgrades.

CD-ROM tends to be sold directly to libraries, despite the expressed preference of libraries to consolidate purchases through agents.

Electronic on-line products tend to be licensed rather than sold, yet no change to archiving arrangements of publishers seems to have been made.

Copyright and intellectual property rights have re-entered the agenda and are a point of contention.

The Royal Society report on the STM Chain was very gloomy over the future.

Microsoft spends $100 million a year on product development and marketing for domestic multimedia.

I won’t say more on this topic except to say that the volatility of the market may perhaps be taken as a given. You can be certain of change in everything except vending machines selling chocolate in underground stations.

Let me then close this section with the luddite bit, the bit that lurks in even the best of new men. The latest carsticker boast is that the computer nerds will inherit the earth. But because technology exists it does not mean that it will be taken up. Most universities are going backwards in terms of the availability of technology for example, while the SuperJournal project actually reduces the number of people with access to information. Big digitisation programmes are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of an electronic world. The world did not come to rely on oil as its basic energy source because of its plentiful supply. We should beware of simplistic technological solutions to complex information problems.

3. Libraries

The library paradigm of the past is based on the assumption that information is entirely print based and that libraries strive for local self-sufficiency by developing the biggest and best collections affordable. The facile then assume that we move from a print-based to an electronic environment where the role of the librarian changes - without giving too much thought to the role of the library, the two not being necessarily the same.

It is a commonplace that the way in which universities have dealt with big journal price rises is to allow the book:journal balance to erode. I then think that we are on the point of replacing a decline in journal subscriptions which has been gentle with one which is savage and for four reasons.

· 70% on journals is about as high as it can get and there is no further room to absorb increases by letting the ratio slide

· Pressure to increase electronic expenditure, which is additional not substitute expenditure and which HEFCE is encouraging

· Pressure of student numbers which means that resource on teaching provision has to be increased rather than even kept static

· Funding council pressure to identify and earmark teaching and research income and expenditure. It is generally agreed that teaching funds have subsidised research and this will largely have to stop.

One way in which libraries can counter this is through revenue generation. This is done in many ways, but I confidently expect a number of major libraries or consortia to move into document delivery. This will be done at marginal cost and under fair use and will give all those committed to full cost and/or licensing payments a headache. Studies by David Brown of DJB suggest that the market is both limited in size and low margin and therefore will not be lucrative.

4. Librarians

Amongst other things I have been asked to comment on how librarians will face the future, so this next section is a potted version of my standard lecture advising library conferences on how to face the future.

I perceive a situation in which librarians have become besotted by a restless search for the latest bright baubles of information technology, who find the provision of a coloured screen windows environment a substitute for thought and who blow in the wind - or is it the flatulence - of every new management fad. The way they must deal with the future is to hold fast to that which is at the core of our profession and to look at a future which has solid roots in our professional present and in the culture of library and information science.

l The organization of knowledge

l Quality assurance of information

l User support

l User instruction

I have used before the example of the American Civil War Series which ran to some sixteen hours of television and is now a standard instructional tool. How is the three minute segment on the Gettysburg address going to be identified? There has been renewed interest of late in trying to enhance catalogue records so tha they rather more fully record what printed volumes contain. This becomes even more of a problem with networked and multimedia resources where a whole new set of issues arise. How do we define the original and uncorrupted text? How do we define the status of the latest and intermediate texts? 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? If gopher type systems are to be set up, are these all to be managed at local level or do we need national subject based initiatives as the Follett report proposes? Managing and making accessible the resources of the Internet is a huge professional challenge and thus far I have to say that I see very little sign that the library profession is getting to grips with the issues - and yet the organisation of knowledge is one of our traditional domains.

Next comes quality assurance. 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. But there are other problems too. Conventional publication has markers. For example, take a monograph entitled Post-War British Immigration. We have quite different expectations from this monograph if it has an Oxford University Press imprint from one which has a British National Party imprint or if the author is Bernie Grant rather than Enoch Powell. To a degree, library acquisition policies have provided a form of quality assurance in that we buy only what is presumed to be relevant or appropriate. But when everything is available without these markers, selection by the user becomes more of a problem.

Thirdly we need to consider and design systems which are user friendly. Much of what we have historically done has been user oblivious, wishing to serve the user of the future rather than the user of today. Everything from traditional problems such as lighting quality or signing and guiding, through to Library tours and the number and availability of OPAC’s or the ease of sending messages from the OPAC to the ILL Department should be considered in looking at the accessibility of the library and its collections and services. Individual areas such as public relations or marketing can be identified readily in professional litereature but I tend to feel that too little thought is sometimes given to looking at the whole environment in which the librarian, the library and the user interact.

And that leads to my fourth and final area of skills, user instruction. Although I and others have talked for quite some time about empowering end users - and indeed services such as BIDS do precisely that, it is equally clear that users require to be helped to take the fullest advantage of that freedom. Most of our 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 critial. Some institutions are now so physically overstretched that they rely on the fact of students not attending university every day to be workable. At the same time financial pressure on students may lead to greater attendance at local institutions so that the student may live at home - again leading to a form of distance - albeit short distance - learning.

The same messages are true for academic staff. At my own institution we have been undertaking a major project funded by BLRDD to consider some of the issues surrounding technology take-up. This is being done through a close study of a small group presented with an information rich environment. A number of perhaps obvious points have emerged. The first problem is finding the time to invest in setting up and learning systems. Secondly there is not a perceived current unmet need for information. Most academics believe they have good information gathering systems already. In part this reflects an understanding of the danger of information overload. Brindley has argued that because of this there is a need for a much greater and more active future role for the librarian in filtering information, mirroring my previous point relating to quality assurance. The still apparently inevitable technical problems lead to great frustration for users. There is also a feeling of enthusiasm and power for those who succeed and of impotence for those who do not. These lead to complex cultural problems and a need for significantly supportive environments although there is a general reluctance to seek support.

So what are librarians to do to address these issues. Kathleen Price, the Law Librarian of the Library of Congress has expressed views which I wholeheartedly support as the basis for the next steps we need to take. She argues that to be participants in the electronic world we have to recognise a number of truths:

· information is a commodity and must be paid for;

· librarians and publishers have provided added value, performed a societal good, and deserve to succeed;

· we are likely to perform different services in a different manner in the future;

· creators of information increasingly have the option of working directly with end users;

· services inherently necessary to the success of the Internet are within our expertise and we should stake them out by the (a) creation of an electronic locator; (b) identification of information to be converted to electronic form; and © provision of public access stations to electronic information with adequate training and internal guides.

It seems to me that these are precisely the areas and ways in which we have to move forward in order to develop our vision of the future knowledge information chain. 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

5. Intermediaries.

Like Cavafy’s Romans you can wait paralysed for the Barbarians - who in his poem never came - or you can move ahead charting your own course and your own future in a way which will allow us to deal with the barbarians. As the cartoon from the Financial Times put it you can stay parked in a rest area somewhere off the information superhighway - or you can move at least into the slow lane if you feel unready for the fast lane. You need to set the agenda for change and you can do it through imaginative extension of your existing professional skills. You also have to decide what you want to be.

At CNI last week I attended a session on cost centres in the information chain. Two points are worth making. The first is that publishers were represented in the documentation and intermediaries were not. Secondly the publishers had articulated clearly where they perceived that they added value, as this slide shows. Now yoyu don’t have to agree or disagree, only to note that they had thought through what value they added and then lobbied to have it included.

What are you doing about this. What value do you add to scholarly communication?

What intelligence gathering do you do? How do you become and stay informed of trends? Are you tapped in to the right people at the right level?

Let me suggest half a dozen action areas or value added areas and one real problem area. Again agree or disagree, but these are some of the issues you should be reacting to

Possibly what librarians prize you for most of all is money laundering.

It will remain a key skill. Even if periodicals work declines, there will be a need for intermediaries who can handle the end of the financial year; who can cope with a one-line invoice. If libraries move into document delivery, they will want agents to handle currency and banking issues.

Single contact point. Compare the emergence of the CD free for all which is just a pain in the neck with the order of the serials market. Libraries want simplicity and will pay for it. The same is true of databases. I don’t want to deal with forty suppliers in fifty countries.

Claims. Don’t think they will go away in an electronic environment. Bulletin boards are full of tales of missing data and software bugs from the most reputable of companies. So again an old skill in a new bottle.

Copyright and textbooks and images. What is your view of CLARCS? Is it something you might run and manage in a different way. If universities move towards retaining IPR, why not offer a copyright permissions management service to universities?

Cataloguing. Could this be outsourced as a form of piecework paid telecottaging. Some institutions are known to be very keen on this. As space charges are introduced in universities the economics of maintaining a catalogue unit say in central London look increasingly unattractive. Retroconversion. BNA has been in this game but you haven’t done it in the UK. Are there opportunities. If Follett puts in £500k a year will it change your view. Reverting to the question of intelligence, what is your estimate of the probability of such sums being made available. The CURL database is run by a bunch of people with other things to worry about, have you thought of facilities managing that and linking it with your problem area of document delivery. What intelligence do you have on that as an option. While I recognise your absolute requirement not to fall out with publishers, what will you do about Uncover if a whole raft of new players come in operating at marginal cost? Would it be better to buy these people into Uncover as suppliers? If so you will likely have to consider a different cost structure.

What will your role be in the coming IPR and copyright wars? Keeping down of heads? Mediator? Ally of one or other side? Innocent bystander? I’d suggest not the last since innocent bystanders are always the ones who get shot.

Network topology is all to rarely considered and that is a role that you need to consider. Telecommunications costs are rarely considered but will be a critical element in all of this. In the UK there are up to 11000 or so serials publishers. Will all of them want to run a network server? Implausible. So they will seek agents for this. Look at the big hitters. International traffic clogs up quickly because we won’t or can’t pay the tariff. So what will Elsevier do? Forego profit because the lines are busy, or, more plausibly open a local server in the UK so that we can run on the basis of local calls. But pick a smaller publisher, a Taylor & Francis say. They won’t want to run perhaps half a dozen servers worldwide and will surely come to realise that they need agents to do this. This introduces another layer of complexity because as a user I will want to route calls to the cheapest carrier. Curiously, in this market, calls to Europe are more expensive than to the US. Managing telecommunications costs will provide a major intermediary market.

Following on from this, I suspect that any company which can offer a bespoke package to learned societies could make a killing in helping them to exploit a future they do not understand. Nor need this take huge investment. There are huge pools of spare disc space with excellent network connections that could be rented from higher education, thus helping to keep costs down.

Quality assurance. The Blackwell name has value. Will you use it as a sort of kitemark? Bad texts in good databases are still bad texts and consumers tend to rely on companies like Blackwwell for some sort of assurance. Parinthetically, but just on the value of names, I’m sure that the issue of choice of partners is important. For example getting into partnership on an EDI project with an institution with no track record in the area and worse no links with the key players begs questions and causes public amusement which is probably better avoided.

What do you want to be? I guess that one way of defining that is by defining who your competitors are. That’s easy at the moment, but do you for example aspire to be a rival to an OCLC which is diversifying like mad?

Are you interested in developing the personal market? Bookselling to the home through a home shopping channel? SDI services? One of the great opportunities of the Internet is for the narrowcasting of services, quite different from the broadcasting we do at present. Tailored CASIAS services for Oxford academics?

Just to close here, always remember that although Benjamin Franklin was the man who harnessed electricity - but it was the man who invented the electricity meter who made the money.

6. Users

All this empowering the end user is all very well but it is rhetoric. And the rhetoric of democracy, the rhetoric of empowerment lead to the certainty of chaos. The major players will continue to be libraries and publishers - but maybe not the same publishers. The emergence of names like Microsoft and Broderbund and the strategic links into companies such as Dorling Kindersley suggest an emerging new set of publishing forces.. But that is a problem for publishers and the PA rather than us. So when I say user I mean institutions and not individuals. I believe that universities will continue to want managed access to information. The worst case if you like is that libraries turn into commodity brokers doing deals on behalf of blocks of users simply because its too tedious and complicated to give everyone in a university £50 and leave them to get on with negotiating their own deals. What CLA and the PA have not accepted or perhaps understood is that most copying is to maximise convenience, not to avoid purchase, and the same will be true of the electronic world.

This new worst case library will then want to deal with a middle man who can negotiate with telecommunications companies, publishers, document delivery suppliers and bankers. Is that your worst case?

We should not confuse the domestic end-user market with the institutional one. The user will remain the institution and it will require the ready supply of information. It may also become a supplier of information itself, in which case it wants an agent to market and manage its product.

In many ways the role of intermediary looks the safest of the lot - but that is on the assumption that you see yourself as intermediaries rather than serials agents and bookshops. Just one last thought from this very mixed bag of stuff. I think that all of us are underestimating - and I include me - how fast this is all happening. This stuff is all here now. These are today’s problems and not tomorrows.

Topics

- The Internet

- The Information Chain

- Libraries

- Librarians

- The role of intermediaries

- The expectations of users

Phases of Project Management

1. Enthusiasm

2. Disillusionment

3. Panic

4. Search for the Guilty

5. Punishment of the Inocent

6. Praise and honour for the non-participants

Librarian’s roles

l The organization of knowledge

l Quality assurance of information

l User support

l User instruction