The User, the Internet and National Planning

UC&R Anglo-French Conference, Nice, September 1995

UK higher education has taken a number of bold steps to deliver network services through national planning. However, underlying these pragmatically organised services is a philosophical approach to information provision. Central to that philosophy is that services should be free at the point of use and that we have a duty to the nation to turn out graduates who are not only eager to use electronic services, but have been taught the skills to take the fullest advantage of this.

After many years of working with data we are quite clear that the major costs of electronic services are the ownership rather than the acquisition costs. It is therefore in areas such as training, centralisation of datahandling, documentation and support that the greatest economies are to be made. We are clear that this is best done through a nationally planned strategy.

We also firmly believe that the state has a responsibility to provide the core infrastructure which enable everyone to have access to the facilities we provide. In that sense the Bangemann Report was a great disappointment since it wishes to leave the development of networks entirely to the market. Since the market has no sense of social responsibility and is interested only in profit this approach may well disenfranchise all but the affluent members of the community. Already in Europe we can see a huge discrepancy in the quality and availability of networks. Instead of enfranchising less favoured regions we run the risk of reinforcing existing discrepancies if the Bangemann approach is adopted.

It is important to remember that increasing classes of information are available only in electronic formats. Satellite data, film, television and radio are obvious examples of this. But the range is growing; in advanced countries the census is available only in machine readable form; weather and crop data, medical and even archaeological data now exists only in electronic form.

The final consideration is the position of publishing and publishers. Many academics can perceive an emerging split between academic and mass market publishing. There is a growing change in the way research is conducted and the results transmitted. A multi-national electronically based future is emerging and while publishers act as though research exists to support publishing (while the opposite is true) it is not clear that they have a long term future in disseminating the results of scholarship.

The JANET network and its services is funded centrally from the grant to Higher Education made by the government. The sum is tiny - some £30 million - compared with the total education budget. However it is large enough to provide significantly greater benefit than we would gain from giving each university a few thousand more pounds. About £23 million of the money is spent on the physical network, connecting every university and research institute and providing the international links to other countries. That leaves some £7 million for the provision of services and for research and development. In addition and as a result of the Follett Report a further £8 million per year has been provided to develop the concept of the digital library and to improve access to existing print on paper collections through electronic means. Two small committees have been set up to manage this process.

Links to both the United States and Europe are both relatively low speed and expensive to upgrade. This may be expressed starkly as giving us a choice to spend our money on content or bandwidth. We have then developed a two pronged strategy of increasing the capacity to cache data, of building mirror sites and as a corollary of protecting the data we create within the UK. Cache sites simply capture the international traffic and store it for a brief period. This assumes that the best guide to what will be used is what has been used. Data is kept for a few days and future requests simply look there first before using the international link. A mirror site takes a deliberately chosen piece of data and keeps a permanently updated copy in the country. Perhaps the best example of this is the Visible Human Project. These images are very large, but much in demand by medical and health science students. We are therefore discussing with the National Library of Medicine setting up a mirror service in the UK, simply to keep transatlantic traffic levels within bounds.

Protection of existing data is important. Computing media have gone through astonishing transformations in the last thirty years and unless there is a systematic attempt to “future-proof” research results they may effectively be lost. We have therefore set up centres to deal with this issue. As part of this whole process we are also determined to ensure that we have an adequate national skills base. Dealing with very large datasets of all sorts will be a key skill in future and we are determined that the UK should not be reliant on others for those key skills. This autumn we shall undertake a major review of the archiving of electronic information.

Let me briefly describe the services we have set up or have planned, principally so that you can see how far beyond the traditional boundaries of the library they go. The first four services provide the infrastructure, support and training which underpins much of the activity.

AGOCG. The Advisory Group on Computer Graphics provides a single national focus for computer graphics, visualization and multimedia. Based at Loughborough it carries out software and hardware evaluations, runs workshops and seminars and assists sites in the introduction of key technologies. It offers a useful “technology watch” service.

BUBL. The BUBL Information Service offers an Internet current awareness service, together with organised, user-friendly access to Internet resources and services with the combined gopher/WWW subject tree being a particular feature. It is organised from Strathclyde University.

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.

UKOLN. The Office for Library Networking which acts as a sort of strategic thinktank and research and development centre. It also acts as the UK Gopher National entry point.

There is also a substantial and growing range of dataservices.

BIDS. Based at the university of Bath this is the only substantial commercial service. It provides access to a range of bibliographic datasets, including the ISI citation indexes, Embase and Compendex. The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences has also just been added.

DATALIB is a new centre set up in Scotland. At present it holds Biosis Previews, Palmer’s Index to the Times and the Periodicals Contents Index.

ESRC DATA ARCHIVE. The Archive is jointly funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the University of Essex. The oldest national centre, founded in 1967, its function is to acquire and preserve research data in the social sciences and humanities and to make them available for analysis and teaching. About 5000 datasets are held currently.

HENSA. This is the shareware archive. It is in two parts with Unix numerical and statistical software offered from the University of Kent and pc software from Lancaster University.

At Kent, Internet searches may also be performed using the archie server and Kent is becoming the national centre for cacheing.

NISS. This set of services is based at the University of Bath and concentrates on current information ranging from yellow pages to newspapers. It aims to promote an electronic information culture through providing access to useful collections of information. It also acts as a gateway to other services and resources and provides information through the NISS Bulletin Board.

MIDAS. Based at Manchester University, this service is one of very large datasets, most notably the UK 1981 an 1991 Census, continuous government surveys such as the General Household Survey, macro-economic time series databanks and scientific datasets. There is a full range of support services for the data.

AHDS. An Arts & Humanities Data Service has just been authorised and will be based at King’s College London. This follows a major feasibility study and the service will broadly be based on the experience of the Essex Archive

SOSIG and EEVL This summer we have set up six subject based centres to provide subject-based access to Internet Resources. We do not believe that the idea of cataloguing the Internet can be anything other than a noble failure. We will spend our resources on identifying, developing and supporting a core of important material 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.

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. It is hoped that the plan for such an image service will emerge within about one year. The feasibility study has been completed and is now out for consultation

Negotiations have been completed for the creation of a national higher education OPAC linking the library catalogues of the collections of the major academic research libraries which form the CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) group. This will have some value for researchers, but the 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 maximum value is obtained from the investment that higher education makes in its library collections. In addition discussions are under way to enrich this OPAC with the records of the research collections of other universities.

Related to this a working party will be set up this autumn to look at the issues relating to the catalogue records of manuscript and archive collections. national funding has been made available to catalogue many of our major collections and the working party will consider whether we should now set up some kind of national archives server.

A review study of CNIDR (Clearinghouse for Networked Information and Resource Discovery) and of InterNIC has been commissioned to consider how we might use these American ideas in a UK context to make generally available information on network developments and standards and to provide advice and leadership on local system design.

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.

Principles

It is also worth considering some of the policy issues which have been exposed in developing our services. 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 price to be charged to institutions for such services but always on the premise 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 as described above. Only for the commercial bibliographic products do are sites required 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 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. Perhaps the next major challenge for the policy is, however, to encourage better and more friendly interfaces. To that end we have begun an evaluation study of OCLC’s Sitesearch to see whether a common interface can be provided at least for bibliographic products.

Fourthly is community involvement. It is a central tenet that resources are to be provided for all disciplines. A Datasets Steering Group has been set up to conduct a planned programme of procurements for all subject areas and it is already planning up to two years ahead. That group conducts product evaluations which involve the relevant academic and library communities in identifying the “best buys” for the subject.

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.

Perhaps the greatest challenge remaining is that of mass instruction. Librarians are used to giving individual or small group support to users. However we now see that we must change and be in a position to pass on information management skills to perhaps 5000 students a year. This will require a major shift of attitude, skills and ambitions.

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.

Conclusion

The analogy is perhaps unfortunate, but what we are consciously doing is the equivalent of giving away drugs in the playground. We see it as our responsibility to create graduate students who are dependent on electronic information and who will go out into the industry and commerce of our country spreading the electronic revolution.

We are creating a distributed national electronic library. That poses its own challenges but I also opens up new possibilities of serving the community. The housebound, the disabled, ethnic minorities and distance learners can all now have the same opportunities which are offered to those in affluent metropolitan areas. We are democratising information.

We have also identified perhaps the most important element of the whole programme - Training. Training ourselves, training staff and training students. While we agonise over whether and what an electronic future might look like, users in their tens of thousands have begun to use these services and to request and require training. It is their above all that our future lies and there above all where we must place our greatest attention.