Some thoughts on network futures for the "Canberra Chapter"

Tony Barry
Mon, 10 March 1997

Introduction

This paper is in response to an invitation from the President of CAUL, Alex Byrne, to provide some draft thoughts on network cooperation between the "Canberra Chapter", cooperative agreement between UK and Australian academic libraries.

To look at possible cooperation between the UK and Australian academic library systems there needs to be a view of what the future of libraries may be in a networked world and where they fit into the support spectrum existing between authors and readers. The traditional functions performed by these industries, publishers, booksellers and libraries, which evolved to support print technology, will be stretched and modified to support networking technologies for the transfer of academic information. This paper does not make any single detailed prediction on how the transfer of such information will occur in the future. Instead it starts with two very different scenarios on how the academic community will interact in a networked world.

The paper next examines those factors which might form a basis for cooperation between the libraries of the tertiary education sectors of two countries involved. These factors can be matters which are common to both or differing, but complementary strengths. In any event, any actions taken by the participants, are only part of a global set of developments which will drive future events.Both countries are technologically advanced but are subject to what happens in the wider network world.

The scenarios

Two scenarios are presented below. They represent a possible range of futures. They are not meant to be a prediction of what will occur. Indeed the future may hold elements of both. The purpose of these scenarios is to raise questions about the type of environment in which the "Canberra Chapter" might operate and stimulate thoughts on, in so far as the library community is able to exert leverage, how events can be influenced to reach one or other or part of these possible futures.

The first scenarios is essentially a conservative view in which the existing environment for libraries is modified but stays essentially the same. I have called "Steady as she goes". The second assumes a radical realignment of the way in which academic information is transmitted. I have labelled "All bets are off".

Steady as she goes

The browser become pervasive method of accessing information in all forms and is progressively absorbed into the operating system of workstations. The need for "special" software to view network information disappears.

The relationship between publisher, bookseller and library readjusts to an online world but there is marginal transfer in responsibility between them. Reference material largely migrates to electronic formats as do conference papers. The scholarly monograph largely remains in print form. The core journals remain in print form but a variety of networked document delivery services supplement access to them at the article level which reduces subscriptions from smaller institution.

Despite threats from publishers, fair dealing remains, and sharing information through the inter library loans system for print material remains important. Mailing paper copies is replaced by network transmission via email. Contractual agreements for access to electronic versions of journals restricts inter library loan as a mechanism to access current article level material but the document delivery services take up the slack.

There is an expansion in the "grey" literature which becomes much more readily available as most is published on the network. This material is locatable via internet indexing robots and in fast moving areas becomes the principal method of scholarly communication. The academic reward, system remains dominated by publishing in the traditional refereed journals. There is growth in specialised disciple based networked indexes to find "grey" literature and traditional material.

Teaching material continues to be dominated by monographs but increasingly delivered via locally printed course packs of selected chapters mediated through copyright agreements with publishers. Subscription based updating services to high use monographs become available across the network. The predicted emergence of virtual universities fails to occur other than through a substantial expansion in distance education. Students clearly choosing, where they can, a campus experience, rather than a virtual offering for their base degrees. There is a greater expansion in educational "refresher" and "updating" courses for graduates which are network delivered, mainly with vocational orientation. Academic libraries satisfy library needs of remote students by electronic reserve operations, agreements with institution near the remote students and redirecting student requirements to commercial document delivery services with and without subsidies. Greater interaction with teaching staff is required.

Libraries continue to play their traditional role in selecting quality material for their clientele and providing a layer of organisation to access it. In the short term evaluative mechanisms like the PICS scheme will be dominated by political needs to filter access by children to network material rather than being deployed to provide filtered access to material which is of scholarly quality. Libraries will mainly assist users to access material by -

All bets are off

The browser disappears and is absorbed into the operating system and the internet become the dominant method for all information delivery.

The boundaries between publisher, bookseller and library become disrupted. Increasingly academic communities attempt to bypass traditional organisations by assisting their staff to directly publish material to the network to be accessed by end users. Many established scholars publish material direct to the network updating their work on an ongoing basis rather than producing static print publications.

Micro payment and other network payment system are perfected. Publishers charge for access either via subscription based sales or pay-to-read techniques leading to economic models based on low charge, high volume sales to end users rather than high cost, low volume sales to libraries. Fair dealing is restricted either through copyright legislation or via the requirements of the contracts required to gain access to the information. Libraries no longer own most current published material and are restricted in what they can do to arrange access to material used by their clientele across the network.

Major media organisations aggressively enter the tertiary education market targeting retraining and updating courses for graduates and the rapidly growing market of the retired community with time and money on their hands. Disney enters this market as a content provider but resists the temptation to establish the Mickey Mouse University.

New forms of network teaching are developed based on interactive technologies and improved methods for network based social interaction for classes and tutorial groups. Networked course material largely replaces the textbook in most fields and access to it is built into course costs. An ongoing subscription to the material provides continuous updating after graduation. The role of the academic library in teaching reduces to -

The "grey" literature become the dominant form of academic communication as traditional journals collapse under the impact of rising costs. While article level delivery becomes the norm, journal titles are maintained as a mechanism for quality control by which peer review is signalled and maintained. Increasingly however academics are judged not by their past publications but by the documents they can keep current on the network. The libraries role in research become one of -

While the effectiveness of full text searching only increases slightly the cost continues to drop substantially. The development of personalised web robots expands rapidly and librarians take over the role of advising and helping users set up their own automated indexes to networked resources. The centrality of the centralised library catalogue declines as increasingly material become available outside the ambit of the library

The insertion of metadata into documents at the time of publishing or created by independent agencies becomes the dominant method of creating cataloguing information. Remote provision of such information becomes increasingly integrated with peer review and evaluation of sources and the library profession competes in this activity with other bodies. It becomes possible to gain access to catalogues generated independently of publishers and of libraries which provide access to information resources as well as location information. Many of these are commercial.

Factors which affect cooperation

There are a number of similarities between the two countries which might be used to foster cooperation.
The are differences which are also significant but may raise possibilities for activities which take advantage of different features in a complementary way.

Areas of possible joint activity

What follows are a series of suggestions for possible areas for action between the partners which draws on the framework above. It is not intended that these ideas form a coherent program, rather that they will suggest a starting point for particular ideas which can be further elaborated and refined.

There is a one limitation which should be kept in mind. The dissemination of information across the internet is a major global phenomenon affecting all aspects of information. Libraries and academic publishing are a small tail of a very large dog. The deployment of physical infrastructure and network capacity will be driven by far greater requirements in the form of commerce and the media industries, than the modest requirements of the library and university sector. Even within universities, direct network use by libraries and library material accessed by their patrons is minor.

Policy formulation

The easiest initial option is to agree on coordinating mechanisms so as to avoid, at the very minimum, duplication of effort. Hopefully this will ensure that Australian and UK efforts, taken together, form a more coherent whole than they would have separately. In part this can be done defacto via the various web sites which describe these programs. More direct means will increase effectiveness For example email list for the decision makers in each country to sound each other out on programs and the establishment of joint public lists where cooperation is desired, to promote discussion and exchange of ideas. Already there is some cross membership of some of the lists set up for purely national purposes such as aus-epub in Australia and lis-elib in the UK.

Training

The provision of network, library and IT training material is a fruitful area for greater support and sharing of effort. This is now out of scope for volunteer efforts. Recently such a group based in Sydney folded through lack of time by the participants. The IETF training working party's secretary is based at Adelaide University but their documentation is badly out of date. Excellent payoff can be achieved by cooperative development and sharing of training material. There are also commercial opportunities.

Subject trees

The need to provide organised access to information sources on the network is well recognised and is one of the few areas on the internet that is actually making money. Despite its faults, the Yahoo server for instance, does provide pointers to higher quality material. Searches of this database are not as swamped by the noise which is found via most of the major, more comprehensive search engines. Individual institutions and professional bodies are developing servers to provide organised access to quality material for their clientele. The World Wide Web Virtual Library provides a distributed model and this model could be used by a cooperative group of university libraries to provide a more comprehensive service to access academic level material. If based in libraries with organisational, rather than volunteer support, a more disciplined approach to classification could be used than is the case with most services on the network presently. Technology could also be developed to provide more detailed indexing based on the Harvest or other technology such as that being developed by the Nordic metadata project. On possible apprach would be to use a traditional classification scheme, Dewey being the obvious apprach possibly in collaboration with the OCLC Scorpion project

Metadata, indexing and PICs

The series of Dublin Core Workshops, the most recent being held in Canberra this month, are designing a methodology to provide disciplined indexing and cataloguing for networked resources rather then the low precision obtainable via the free text robots currently deployed. This technology has now attracted the interest of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who hope in a few months to modify the HTML standard to better support metadata within documents. They also plan to modify the PICS standard so that metadata can be deployed via remote PICS servers which carry evaluative and rating information for documents. These standards are designed with a distributed and cooperative environment in mind and can provide functions on the network analogous to selection and cataloguing. A test bed implementation based on a wide range of universities during the early stages of this technology could ensure that the expertise of librarians was incorporated into the developments.

OPAC developments

The development and rapid deployment of the web enabled OPACs, with hypertext links to the text of the document catalogued or a document about it, raises a range of new issues and possibilities which a consortia of institutions may wish to develop. The catalogue can become, not just a descriptive and locational tool, but can also a delivery mechanism. It can give links to items a library does not hold as well as those it does. If a collection of MARC records containing URL links was developed participating library could then load them and gain access to the material from their catalogues simply by loading the records without the labour of locating and cataloguing the material themselves. For instance -

The examples above were based upon access to one database, the library OPAC. The library sector has been pushing the z39.50 protocol for some years. This protocol enables many databases to be searched simultaneously but is only just beginning to be deployed in libraries (mainly in the UK) and in the government sector, principally in North America. Improved use of this protocol raises a number of possibilities.

Personal Information management tools

There is considerable flux in the market for tools to enable individual researchers to handle databases of links to network resources. Some are-

This type software will be a very important tool for students and researchers and the library sector is best positioned to advise on its use and guide its development. This software has the potential to enable individuals and small organisation to create their own personalised "catalogues" to network resources.

Virtual Reference Service

With an expansion in distance learning and virtual university concepts, virtual advisory services will be essential. Library services were once limited to building opening hours. While electronic services may be available 24 hours per day human assistance is not. Institutions cooperating across the globe can circumvent this by providing a virtual advisory service via the network with communication technologies like Internet Relay Chat, Email or Internet Talk. Taking advantage of being in different time zones the communication can be automatically switched to an institution which is currently open. This works best however,if there are at least three equally spaced areas across the globe - like the Deep Space Tracking Network in Tidbinbilla (Australia), Madrid and Goldstone(California).

If virtual readers advisory services are workable it is also worth looking at subject specialisation. There are few libraries which can field highly capable subject specialists in more than a few topics. If advice is offered across the network to local patrons it is a logical step to do what librarians have always been good at - cooperation - and share the expertise of the few specialists not just the collection. As reference and readers advice moves away from a service based on professionals at a desk to professionals who are consulted when available physically or virtually such an approach becomes readily acceptable.

Retrospective conversion

There is considerable interest in converting classical material on paper which is out of copyright to electronic formats - Project Gutenberg being a somewhat controversial example. The cost of doing this is usually expensive and has either been done by enthusiasts or commercial firms. On the other hand grant funding may be available. UK and Australia sharing some common cultural traditions have a joint interest in converting material such as early colonial history and exploring joint projects in agreed areas. At the very least a joint register of conversion projects would be valuable tool to avoid duplication.

Course material

There is a rapid growth of courses offered across the network. In part this will be dependent on the availability of learning material of the type traditionally placed in reserve collections. The hopes of institutions producing such courses to attract remote students will be dependent on the efficiency with which such courses can be offered and course material assembled. Prospective students also have the problem of finding such courses. There is currently a lack of coordinating mechanisms as each institution follows its own path and the traditional technologies used by the open and distance learning communities are overturned. The library sector has an opportunity to enter this area by developing cooperative mechanisms or other techniques to -

Epilogue

We are at the start of revolution in human communications which will have great impact on the functions currently supported by the library community. Many of these functions will be mediated by network and descriptive protocols presently under development which undertake, or support functions carries out by the library community in the world of print. The main protocols are -

On the internet the development of such protocols is normally driven by those groups who can most quickly deploy working test examples. If the library community's expertise is to be used it must participate in these development for its expertise gained in the past to be taken into the future. If it does not, it risks losing in the future, the responsibilities and functions it enjoyed in the past to others more agile.

Tony Barry
 Tony.Barry@anu.edu.au
 Last updated Mon, 10 Mar 1997