LASER Conference on national resources

Thank you for that kind introduction. I wish my parents could have been here to hear it. My father would have been impressed and my mother would have believed it. I have a lot of material to get through in twenty minutes, so I hope that you will forgive me for adopting a brisk pace.

Librarians, library system suppliers and libraries have proved remarkably reluctant to accept the reality of end-user access and continue to devise systems in which librarians act as intermediaries as of right. This attempt to channel information through the library uniquely is doomed to failure and we would do well to recognise that. In the UK the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils (hereafter "we") is attempting to devise national structures for end-user access in higher education based on this premise. In describing those structures I hope that you will get some view of the underlying principles which are taking us forward to create the Distributed National Electronic Collection, which is being funded as part of our running budget but also through additional funds for the so-called Follett programme. Although this is being done for higher education, I hope that you will find parallels with your ambitions - it would take little for our work to become part of a common electronic reference library for example - it is also our wish to share information wherever possible. We are good free traders rather than little Englanders.

I want to begin by making four assertions which have in part guided us in policy issues in this area:

1. Cataloguing the Internet is a grand and necessary ambition, but it may prove as necessary but as impossible as IFLA's programme of Universal Bibliographic Control.

2. It is important that we do not allow the STM model to dominate our thinking. Mediaeval historians and economists are as important as chemists.

3. Librarians have not been notably succesful in joint collection building, in part due to histories going back hundreds of years. This despite an often expressed and genuinely felt wish to cooperate. This may also be less true in at least some parts of the public library system

4. That said, the start of the electronic era allows us an opportunity for a fresh start in which electronic collections can be shared. This requires planning and intervention at a national level, since librarians have failed at a local level.

Three or four years ago It was popular to lecture about the then fashionable concept of moving from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican World. You will remember that the library centred world was compared to Ptolemy's where the concerns of the library were to do with money and meetings, with salesmen and acquisitions - and only peripherally with readers. The sun moved round the earth. Many became excited by the new Copernican world view, the user centred view where the proper symmetry of the earth revolving round the sun was seen and understood. Now the library was only one of a range of information sources required by the user, who had access to video, research results, correspondence with colleagues, their own books and journals and from time to time the library. This was seen as providing a model on which the next generations of user centred systems could be built. But libraries remain recidivists and they and their suppliers continue to cherish the notion that they can act as some kind of filter and/or guide to information, even when this is a demonstrable vanity.

But the popular view, fostered by press and politicians is equally vain. The popular view is that the user sits at the terminal, buys or acquires a connection to the Internet and then passes through some cloud of unknowing to the resources of the world. It would be charitable to call that naive and there is a need to create and develop a major infrastructure to make this a reality. A much more sensible reaction is that of the American sociology professor exposed to networked information for the first time, who talked of the "howling wastes of the Internet".

My own view is that the Internet is much more like one of those jigsaw puzzles where the pieces have no picture and one can use only tireless patience and logic to put the shape together. I am not sure that cataloguing the pieces in traditional ways is any solution although it may provide destitute cataloguers with a form of charitable outwork for the deserving poor. In the UK our preferred approach is to provide a core of essential resources which will be the first resort of network users and attempt to use that as a magnet for other high quality locally created resources which can be linked through metadata.

Rather than set out to complete the jigsaw and catalogue the universe, we are assuming that Bradford's Law of Distribution (the 80:20 rule) applies and that the majority of user needs can be met from a limited range of resources. So we are putting together a smaller catalogue of resources which will be centrally funded, centrally provided, but held in distributed locations. We will settle for the earth rather than the universe

Some of the building blocks are already in place, with names which are familiar to some of you. More are planned. By linking these to user defined resources through the use of metadata, we hope to begin to create a resource which will meet most user needs. Clearly this is an evolving process, but the first signs are encouraging in that the usage figures for all our services are huge, typically running at over 100,000 connections each month, with some several times that figure.

Let me briefly mention the services we are providing, starting with the infrastructure elements. Note throughout the range of institutions involved in this.

BUBL. Housed on a machine at Bath, but managed from Strathclyde University, BUBL is an internationally used set of metadata, providing news and guidance on the entire range of networked resources worldwide. It exists thanks to massive voluntary effort.

MAILBASE. Based at the University of Newcastle this organises the Listserv activity in the United Kingdom. Its brief is wider however and it also sets out to organise the communities which will operate listservers. It has had notable success in this field, not least with university administrators.

In addition we fund UKOLN the UK Office for Library Networking which acts as a sort of strategic thinktank. We are also committed to a review study of CNIDR and of InterNIC to consider how we might use these ideas in a UK context. We also consider membership of CNI a valuable resource.

There is also a substantial and growing range of dataservices.

HENSA. This is the shareware archive. It is in two parts with UNIX shareware offered from the University of kent and pc software from Lancaster University. Used by over 100,000 people each month the service offers an astonishingly diverse range of material.

NISS. This set of services is based at the University of Bath and concentrates on current information ranging from yellow pages to newspapers. It also acts as a gateway to other services and resources, notably OCLC's Firstsearch.

MIDAS. Based at Manchester University, this service is one of very large datasets, most notably the UK Census and satellite mapping data.

BIDS. Based at the university of Bath this is our only substantial commercial service. It provides access to the ISI datasets, to Embase and Compendex. The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences will be added at the end of the year and further dataset purchases are planned. Our intention in the long term is to purchase up to twenty datasets covering all disciplines, so that every member of staff and every student has at least one major resource available to them. These bibliographic dataservices are currently used by some 7000 people every day, with figures having shot up 50% this October over the previous year.

ESRC DATA ARCHIVE. Based at Essex University, this also contains many governmental and NGO datasets. Its other function is to act as a home for archiving research data in the social sciences and it has provided an enormously valuable role in this way for many years.

Two other projects are in hand, but do not yet have host sites. We are about to seek a home for an Arts & Humanities Data Service. The feasibility study for this has just been completed and we expect it to provide a home for all sorts of primary and secondary material. Secondly, work has just begun on defining a national image centre. Higher Education produces thousands of images each year ranging from medical and dental through to Art & Design. We are concerned that these should be retained within and made available to the wider academic community. We may hope to see such an image service emerge within about one year.

In addition to those existing services a further set of proposed services is under active discussion and work has begun on defining them.

Firstly there is a national higher education OPAC linking the collections of the major academic research libraries. This will have some value for researchers, but our intention is to link it to new distributed document delivery services which will serve different parts of the country or different subject areas and ensure that we obtain maximum value from the investment that higher education makes in its collections. We intend to set these services up cheaply and at marginal cost under fair use provisions in order to maximise our investment in materials.

The Higher Education Funding Councils have begun to treat seriously the issue of access to material for disabled students and are funding a number of projects in this area. A study has been commissioned to then consider what is needed to support their access to Internet resources, particularly for the visually impaired. We want not only to empower the end-user, but to ensure that all groups are enfranchised.

Finally we are embarking on a digitisation programme which will make available resources on the network. Various models are proposed, some commercial ventures, some partnerships with small publishers and some for heavily used out of copyright material. The intention is to cover a wide range of disciplines and not just to look at science. We are trying to create a resource base for all disciplines.

Now let me look at some of the policy issues we have exposed. We have developed our own answers to these, but we do not presume that these answers have validity outside the United Kingdom. However, the list of issues may expose areas which everyone needs to consider.

Firstly, it is a cardinal principle that information must be free at the point of use. Where commercial information is provided it is either paid for from central funds or by the institution or by some combination of the two, but never by the end-user. We want to encourage and stimulate use as a strategic national goal. On the whole suppliers do not lose. There is already anecdotal evidence of increased downstream use. As students become employees they are beginning to seek the same electronic resources they used daily at university. We have had and do have major debate over the cost to be charged to institutions for such services but on on the principle that services are free at the point of use. In practice most are wholly free and are paid for by "top-slicing" the higher education budget. Only for the commercial bibliographic products do we require sites to make a payment.

Secondly, we are committed to subscription based or licensing models and will not fund transaction based models. There is always another alternative product and only the most arrogant of publishers believe that they have a true monopoly. In fact there is some evidence that our policy is beginning to affect the use of products from those publishers who are not willing to accept this model.

Thirdly, and perhaps obviously we attempt to involve the community in the selection process. When I say community I mean the university and not the library community. Librarians have a tendency only to want to save money by making available the big-heavily used science dataservices, whereas we wish to make a range of resources available to all disciplines, and not just big commercial datasets.

Fourthly is the commonality of interfaces. The concept of a common command language for material as varied as the Census, wordprocessing software and bibliographic data is an evident nonsense. However by grouping material together in locations by type, whether bibliographic, full text or numeric, we have been able to go some way towards providing common interfaces to the various datasets.

The last point to mention is our present policy of delivering information to everyone. This means delivering to the poorest sort of terminal, currently defined as a VT100. Inevitably this frustrates users with more powerful equipment. As a result we are about to conduct a census of terminals in UK higher education to decide whether it is now time to move the definition upwards without disenfranchising significant numbers of users with old equipment.

And so this leads us to the underlying goal of the distributed national electronic collection. It is clearly at this point incomplete and it will take several years to have all the elements in place. Some services will succeed and others will fail; we shall have disappointments along the way. But the objective is clear, to create a central core of material which is centrally defined but meets user needs in all disciplines. The user will then have a limited need to search for materials outside the core. We will spend our resources on developing the core rather than on cataloguing anything that might ever be used on the Internet. In doing this we hope to provide a variant of Gresham's Law. While bad money may drive out good, we hope that quality assured data, available reliably and with excellent nationally prepared documentation will remove the need to use unknown data of unknown validity available intermittently and unreliably. As a useful byproduct, by spinning or cacheing within the UK the most heavily used material we should limit needless and expensive international traffic. We would rather spend resource on services than extra bandwidth on the fatpipe.

Well that just about describes what we are trying to achieve, but with a slightly forced link I thought I might summarise what we are aiming for with a small tribute to someone the hundredth anniversary of whose birth seems to have gone largely unremarked. His modern fables provide one of the guiding principles of my life and of this programme - “Don’t get it right get it written”. He was an amazing cartoonist and illustrator and gave us one of the mythic characters of the twentieth century, Walter Mitty. However I’m tempted to name our programme Excelsior after his illustrations for the Longfellow poem.

We will not be diverted by the warnings of the old man who warns “Try not the pass the old man said, Dark lowers the tempest overhead.”

Nor are we ready to stop for the sake of comfort “O stay the maiden said and rest”

Instead we shall press on up our mountain of ambition carrying “that banner with the strange device Excelsior” as fully paid up members of the James Thurber School of Networking.