Members of the information technology and library communities have been
talking for some time about the potential wonders of an electronic,
information-rich environment. Judging from the flurry of reports and
predictions in the popular and trade press, the realization of this
dream is imminent. On the cover of Time magazine, in the business
section of the Sunday New York Times, on the cover of Forbes Technology
Supplement--one sees references to the information superhighways that
will soon provide access to the libraries of the world via advanced
television sets. Moreover, the emergence of the National Research and
Education Network (NREN) and the commitment of the new administration in
Washington have made it clear that the federal government believes that
a strong electronic infrastructure is essential to economic growth in
the next decades.
Unfortunately, it is very unlikely that as things stand now the
electronic libraries foreseen in the popular press will appear anytime
soon.
True, our world is being rapidly connected by the converging
technologies of computing and telecommunications. The infrastructure of
data highways and household information appliances--televisions and
computers--is being created with astonishing speed. Many of our
information needs--such as in the areas of news, shopping,
entertainment, and banking--will be met via this infrastructure. The
changes are well under way and are being effected by actual patterns of
investment and industry alliances. The envisioned future is not just a
matter of academic analysis, journalistic imagination, or governmental
industrial policy: corporate strategies and a tremendous amount of
capital are already being risked on the assumption that these prophecies
are by and large true. Or, to put it another way, strategy and capital
are being deployed to make these prophecies true.
At present it is the commercial drive for additional entertainment
outlets that is providing the content of these infrastructures. There
are many parallels between the base technologies that would make movies,
video games, and shopping available on demand and those that would make
our educational and research information available electronically. But
there are crucial differences between the commercial and academic
industries. Unlike commercial and entertainment services such as Turner
Broadcasting, Time-Warner, and TCI, which have existing organizations
and the capital in place to make such new ventures viable, the 3,200-
plus college and university libraries, which operate as independent
organizations offering duplicative services, possess none of the
requisite capital, organizational structure, or corporate culture
necessary to move effectively into the new world. Nor do they have an
organizational structure or corporate culture that would support
effective action and development in a rapidly changing environment. The
aggressive pattern of coordinating alliances, strategic action, and
capital reallocation that characterizes the commercial information
industry is unimaginable in the academic world. There is no effective
organizational mechanism in place in the educational arena that could
provide the cohesive leadership and management necessary for the
development and implementation of an electronic library.
The possibility of making the "library of Alexandria" available to
everyone with a connection to the network is certainly feasible from the
technological perspective, but a sober appraisal of the significant
financial, logistical, legal, and contractual obstacles suggests that
this dream may be long way off.
We know where we want to go--but not how to get there
The problem is not that we do not know where we want to go. Recently a
series of meetings was held to share the perceptions of chief academic
officers and librarians from many of our greatest institutions of higher
education. The results of those meetings indicated that there was a very
clear common vision of the future: universal access to information in
all possible media via a single, multifunctional workstation. That
vision is shared by those leading the technology enterprises of our
universities, as well as by many faculty, who see new and exciting
methods of instruction that facilitate students' integration of the
knowledge of the ages. But while the conferences reported reflecting a
common vision, they also reported another commonality: no one has yet
charted the way we might achieve this dream.
Academic leaders, librarians, and technologists alike all seem to be
waiting for the information revolution to take place. But such a future
is not likely to be realized soon, partly because nobody is stepping
back and looking closely at the problem, partly because a disaster that
is at our doorstep is not fully recognized, and partly because of the
terrible history of poor cooperation between institutions of higher
education.
Unfortunately, if we do not begin immediately to plan for the future,
our libraries, our educational institutions, and, ultimately, the very
intellectual fiber of our broader society will be in real jeopardy, for
current economic trends in the information industry are rapidly bringing
traditional libraries to a point of ruin. This article outlines a plan
that can help us avoid this disaster and make the common vision a
reality. But we will not see this wonderful future unless we focus a
concerted discussion on how to create it.
Our libraries are caught in the cross fire of a host of pressures that
make the future of libraries--as we know them today--extremely
precarious. For the past two decades, librarians have sounded the alarm
to alert us to the slow fires within the walls of our libraries as the
acid within book paper is destroying the books that constitute the
intellectual history of our civilization. However, such problems pale in
comparison with the economic threats that have the potential to cripple
the ability of our libraries to preserve information for generations to
come. Though there have been warnings regarding the erosion of our
libraries' ability to acquire information due to inflationary trends,
the full impact of those trends does not seem to have been recognized.
If current trends continue, then by the year 2026, the acquisitions
budgets of our finest libraries will have only 20 percent of the buying
power they had forty-five years earlier. If one assumes that
information is doubling every four years, then by the year 2001, the
combined impact of inflation and the growth of information would result
in our libraries' being able to purchase only 2 percent of the "total"
information acquired only two decades before.
What is to happen to the libraries if they cannot afford to buy
information and make it available free of charge? The economic trends
are more than dire--they are insurmountable! This situation must be
addressed immediately and it must be recognized at the outset that there
is no way for the old paradigm to work.
This same conclusion was reached by a recent Mellon Foundation report
that stated:
The rapidly rising prices of materials, the continued increase in the
number of items available for purchase, the fact that university
libraries seem to be acquiring a declining share of the world's output,
the impracticality of continuing to build large, costly, warehouse-type
structures to shelve printed materials, thus replicating collections
that exist elsewhere--these and other developments cause one to question
whether established practices, which are already eroding, can be
continued for very much longer.
A new and revolutionary paradigm must be developed that meets the
economic parameters of our institutions but that still supports the
traditional values of libraries and scholarship.
The Electronic Solution
The electronic library represents a solution to the economic problems
facing libraries and is a vehicle for the new functionality that
promises to transform scholarship and bring the cultural, social, and
economic benefits of information to the many. In the first place, it
will make unnecessary the expensive duplication of resources.
Institutions need not purchase expensive resources when they have access
to a large shared collection. Such access will make possible a greater
integration of information, because the tools for navigating the great
amount of available information will be embedded in the software.
Information can be integrated and connected to related concepts, and
compound documents incorporating text, pictures, video, and sound can
allow for the multimedia environments that create new educational
horizons.
One of the dangers of the information explosion has been the increase in
specialization. Unless we can create educational environments that are
multidisciplinary in nature, we face the danger that we will become not
one global village, in McLuhan's term, but thousands of tiny global
villages none of which is particularly connected to the others.
Electronic formats, with their support for hypertext links and rapid
navigation, can help restore the traditional, integrative function of a
liberal arts education. The electronic library can also help to make
learning a lifelong opportunity available to those in the north woods of
Maine or in a tenement in New York, since proximity to the sources of
information will no longer be required. If we don't create an
information infrastructure that is technically and electronically
available to everyone, we will have missed an opportunity to change our
society.
Of course no single model could adequately meet the needs of our large
and extraordinarily varied community of users, all of whom desire to use
an ever-growing body of information, which exists in an increasing set
of formats and media. It is unreasonable to expect any single model to
act as an umbrella for the entire set of information needs of our
society. However, it is extremely disturbing that little if any movement
is being made to develop models that could serve the scholarly,
educational, and academic needs of our society in the coming decades.
There is a desperate need for a model or a plan, so that various
stakeholders can critique, amend, and amplify an initial proposal,
resulting in a framework from which we might begin discussion.
Toward a Business Plan for a National Electronic Library
The new model for the twenty-first century, whatever its final form,
must be based on certain principles. The first is that there should be
free access. Obviously, it would be unwise to create a library system
in which one could conduct only as much research as one could afford to
pay for. Insofar as possible, the electronic library should work toward
a goal it shares with Jeffersonian democracy: the free flow of
information and an informed populace.
Second, the library should focus on material and issues most critical to
the needs and roles of colleges and universities. It should collect and
preserve those materials not likely to be held by other institutions.
The emphasis should be on research publications and electronic journals
rather than, for example, popular fiction.
Third, in order to achieve this focus, the new library must work with
other structures--both commercial and public--that also provide
information via the network. It may well serve as a "gateway" or
reference desk, cross-referencing projects at universities or other
institutions, as well as letting the end user know of commercial
databases that may also be available.
Fourth, the electronic library must anticipate the future as well as
archive the past. From its inception, it must support new forms of
scholarship and education. This means that as soon as reasonable
standards have been established for the long-term codification of
material, complex documents such as hypertext and hypermedia should be
made available. To facilitate scholarship in the new environment, it is
imperative that the new library be very aggressive in advancing
experimentation with and storage of interactive documents that have
embedded pictures, sound, data sets, and graphics.
What Kind of Structure Would Best Meet These Needs?
What sort of project would meet the goals of an electronic library and
reflect the aforementioned principles? Several models are presented
here, and the strengths and weaknesses of each are briefly discussed.
An Entertainment Model
The entertainment model, exemplified by U.S. network and cable
television, relies on the large audiences of consumers willing to pay
directly for access to information or who represent advertising
opportunities for commodity products. For obvious reasons, this model
seems to favor material with broad appeal and thus will ultimately tend
toward content such as highly digested news, tabloid sensationalism, and
video formats.
Unfortunately there is little reason to believe that the entertainment
model could successfully support electronic access to research
libraries, to video collections of museum artifacts, or to the pursuit
of depth or cultural value in any arena. The forces that in 1961 led
Newton Minnow, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission,
to refer to television as a "vast wasteland" will militate strongly
against the delivery of academic information via the entertainment
model.
A Pay-per-Publication Model
Another commercial possibility for the network is a model in which
information is disseminated electronically on a piece-rate charging
system. With such a model, users who wanted to have access to specific
information would purchase it on an individual basis, for instance,
buying a journal article based on a fee per page purchased. Already,
vendors such as the Colorado Association of Research Libraries and Faxon
have initiated such models, allowing a library to offer access to papers
in little-known journals without maintaining subscriptions to those
journals.
Though this may be an important intermediate strategy to offset some of
the spiraling inflation costs currently being experienced, this model is
not consistent with the values of the academy or of society at large. If
a purchase-per-copy model were adopted, several outcomes are likely.
Because it is access, and not ownership, that is being purchased, the
cooperation that has historically occurred between libraries would no
longer be possible. Because institutions with lesser means have always
depended on the wealthier institutions for access--via interlibrary
loan--to more esoteric information, the schism between haves and have-
nots would widen even further. This also applies to the many other
libraries in our communities, including our K�12 institutions.
Information that might be available through these alternative models
would not necessarily fulfill the broad range of needs that the
traditional research libraries have fulfilled. Because this would be a
commercial venture, it is unreasonable to expect such entities to be
able to meet esoteric demands, for the sheer lack of demand associated
with such materials would not cost-justify providing such access.
Finally, it is essential to point out that the pay-per-publication
approach could only result in less rigorous scholarship. If scholars
and/or their libraries have limited budgets, as most assuredly they
will, we are likely to see cost savings at the expense of high-quality
scholarship. If a biomedical researcher has funds to review only, say,
twenty of the hundred available references related to a given subject,
what implications does this have for the advancement of research and
scholarship? It speaks against quality and thoroughness and is likely to
result in the suboptimal use of limited research funds. Failure to
thoroughly conduct a literature review is likely to cause duplication or
unnecessary replication. Worse yet, lack of awareness of known
drawbacks, such as side effects, might result in conclusions or results
that do harm to our society.
A Government Model
The federal government has always played a prominent role in the funding
of the archiving and distribution of information, and the development of
an electronic information infrastructure is part of President Clinton's
agenda:
Today's "Information Age" demands skill, agility, and speed in moving
information. Where once our economic strength was determined solely by
the depth of our ports or the condition of our roads, today it is
determined as well by our ability to move large quantities of
information quickly and accurately and by our ability to use and
understand this information. Just as the interstate highway system
marked a historical turning point in our commerce, today's "information
superhighways"--able to move ideas, data, and images around the country
and around the world--are critical to American competitiveness and
economic strength.
Many in academia would subscribe to the notion that information access
is critical to both our academic and our economic futures. However,
several serious concerns arise regarding the appropriate role of the
government in the development of the infrastructure itself--
specifically, the desirability of government oversight of the
organization that provides electronic library access.
The arguments associated with the government's involvement in a venture
such as the library are really quite varied: It can be strongly argued
that government investment in support of an electronic library
accessible to all colleges, universities, high schools, and so on would
have strong impact for the common good; however, dependency on
government funding is not a desirable solution. At least for the
foreseeable future, the priorities of a sagging economy do not speak
well for the level of funding necessary to support the new library, not
to mention the longer-term issues of consistency of funding. A second
major concern surrounds the recent dialogues over public funding for the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the subsequent discussions about
government censorship have the potential of working at direct odds with
the strong commitment necessary on the part of educational institutions
and libraries alike to make all information available.
Finally, the temptation to fall into the trap of ethnocentrism--creation
of a national electronic library--must be avoided. Just as with the
duplicative structure of state libraries mentioned earlier, failure to
leverage our investments and make the network as rich as possible will
lead nowhere. Parochial thinking must be avoided as we create the new
library. The current efforts of the Biblioth�que de France, as well as
major initiatives in other countries, call not only for cooperation
between the institutions in this country but also for cooperation across
national boundaries. It is hoped that encouragement and financial
support by the federal government would be forthcoming in support of
this new structure, but the government should not be the holding entity.
Rather, the federal government should be one of the supporters of the
initiative via a private, and independent, organization--one that has
independent funding and avoids the dilemmas of censorship.
A Nonprofit Corporation Model
The last model to be discussed and the one endorsed by this writer is an
independent nonprofit organization. Such an organization would be a
single focal point for negotiations and central brokerage by eliminating
unnecessary costs and duplication, leveraging resources, and promoting
standards.7 It would work with public and private institutions, leverage
philanthropy, be a partner in the broader market structure, and help to
reshape the very market of which it is a part. This model would have all
the enormous financial and legal benefits of being a charitable entity,
set up for the benefit of the broader society.
Such a structure would be intended to facilitate philanthropy, but that
is not to suggest it would be anything but efficient and businesslike.
In fact, this nonprofit corporation would be carefully structured to
operate as an independent, efficient business, quite unlike most of the
consortia, cooperative associations, and public institutions that
characterize much of higher education. As an independent business, this
"library" can act independently, decisively, and quickly to implement a
given decision.
Though it would be expected that such an entity would be highly
responsive to the needs of its clients, this model should not be
mistaken for a member organization, which would get bogged down in
procedure and undue deliberation before achieving consensus. It will
work together with institutions of higher education and other
stakeholders and must be willing to be shaped by these academic
partners, but at the same time, it will actively resist the tendency to
conform to the least common denominator by overemphasizing consensus--as
academic enterprises are prone to do.
Finally, the organization's status as an independent entity and a
provider of services would allow colleges and universities to work
together to keep the costs of higher education down, without running
into the jeopardy of the antitrust considerations that have threatened
the academic community in recent years.
Considerations in Developing a Business Plan
How would this plan work? Where should we start? How can the effort be
supported? Following are a suggested set of assumptions, or basic
considerations, that should inform our planning.
Define a business plan based on voluntarism. In order for this library
to be affordable, it needs to draw upon both general philanthropy and
the voluntary support and tangible contributions of its "clients." There
would be every reason to expect that the clientele that uses the
library's services might also contribute to its assets. The notion of
support for a "commons" is possible because of the direct benefit that
clients will accrue, as well as the mutual interest in its success.
Voluntarism will hopefully take the form of institutions' actively
working to make available in electronic format the resources they "own"
and to which they have legal copyright and then give this electronic
library the right to make those resources available to its patrons in a
nonexclusive manner. By having institutions pay voluntarily, the
library can keep its accounting and overhead structures to the barest of
minimums and thus use available funds in the most strategic manner
possible to obtain more electronic resources.
Focus on institutional payment for access, not on individual users. It
is envisioned that institutions would voluntarily pay for the services,
thus allowing access to the library resource free of charge to
individual users. If each college and university committed a fair share
to support the enterprise, then the goal of availability and access free
of charge to all end users becomes a reality. Such a procedure would
greatly simplify the logistics involved, avoiding passwords and complex
charging algorithms, and most important, it would create an
extraordinarily egalitarian environment in the form of open access for
the K�12 environment, availability to those in industry who needed
access to current technical information, and accessible lifelong
learning. Avoiding individual charging would make this a national and
international resource, which was available to all "students," no matter
their age or their economic condition.
The logical question, of course, is, Why would institutions pay for what
they could get for free? How would one go about defining a "fair share"
for an institution's fee for services in such an enterprise? In many
ways, there are already some fairly solid predictors of what this share
might be. The vast amount of the money that goes into the acquisition of
library resources is spent by a fairly small number of research
institutions. They pay the most at present because they have the
greatest needs, the most faculty, the most research programs, and the
most graduate students needing access to academic and scholarly
information. Comprehensive universities clearly have a need for such
information, but less so. This pattern continues through the various
Carnegie classifications of schools, each fulfilling its own respective
missions.
Altogether, our nation's college and university budgets for library
acquisitions appear to be somewhere in excess of $1 billion annually. If
each school tithed (donated 10 percent of) its library acquisition
budget in support of this electronic library, then $100 million per year
would be available to buy the rights to build an electronic library
collection. These funds, supplemented by corporate donations, government
support, international universities and governments, and general
philanthropy would provide the economic clout to turn around the upward
economic spiral that is currently paralyzing our libraries.
Employ the existing infrastructure. The new library should not be a
large entity. It should neither employ lots of people nor maintain a
large computer center to store information. Instead it should be a
prototype of a "virtual organization," with the best minds in the
country collaborating on problems, from whatever institution they might
be affiliated with, and either volunteering their services or working on
a contract basis. It would be wasteful and technically inefficient to
create a central computing facility to store the electronic library's
materials when the very customers the entity is attempting to serve
currently operate some of the most advanced state-of-the-art facilities
and networks in the country. Those existing resources should not be
duplicated; rather, data should be accessed from its home base in the
collection of a particular institution.
Increase leverage via cooperation with other stakeholders. Just as this
library must avoid duplication and increase cooperation with the college
and university stakeholders it would serve, it must also use that
strategy with stakeholders outside higher education. The new library
should avoid duplication and competition with existing structures that
currently support this mission, such as the Online Computer Library
Center and Research Libraries Group. These groups should be critical
partners with the new entity. Joint ventures, subcontracting, and other
business relations should be explored in order to avoid duplication and
offer maximum service to the institutions that support local resources.
Because a significant amount of the total cost of putting a physical
book on the shelf of our libraries is due to the cost of cataloging,
every effort should be made to reduce that cost by identifying
institutions with special ability to catalog different types of
information, thus reducing duplication and waste and assisting other
organizations in their efforts to distribute catalog information
electronically. Unlike current efforts, libraries wouldn't be buying
what they catalog, and an economy of scale on the cataloging process
could be further achieved.
Focus on the academic information that is most strategic. The initial
acquisitions for the library will undoubtedly be items in the public
domain, academic databases that have been generated at colleges and
universities, existing data that have been stored electronically, and so
forth. This will be essential in order to build up a critical mass as
quickly as possible, as well as provide access to such data that may not
have been easily located in the present state of affairs. However,
although this will be a first strategy and may well augment the material
available to many subscribing libraries, the collection will not
fundamentally change the economics that necessitated creation of the
library in the first place.
A primary strategy of the electronic library must be to change the
publication paradigm for serials to the maximum degree possible. It is
the cost of serials that has most added to the inflationary spiral, and
scientific serials pose the biggest problem. One of the primary purposes
of the electronic library must be to provide a coherent and stable
environment in which electronic journal publishing can flourish. Faculty
will be less likely to publish in an electronic format if the format is
perceived to be quaint, experimental, or otherwise not standard and
acceptable. The new library provides some of that stability and, at
minimum, a coherent outlet by which research and scholarship can be
disseminated and obtained. The library may indeed become a "publisher"
in some instances; it may only provide a vehicle for collection and
dissemination in others. However, the most fundamental change that must
occur is a change in the manner in which rights are given to publishers
for the academic information that is generated within the higher
education community.
Work with publishers to develop models for national and international
site licenses. Having information available in a nearly universal manner
necessitates a new approach to pricing for those pieces of intellectual
property to be purchased. In its simplest form, this requires national
or international site licenses in the form of a contract allowing all
citizens of a nation, or everyone without exception, access to the
information in question. Currently such contracts do not exist.
Considerable work needs to be done--in conjunction with publishers--to
create and pilot test such arrangements.
Define technical standards. If the new library is to become a reality,
the entity must work diligently to select, or if necessary develop, the
technical standards that are essential for electronic information to
proliferate as widely as possible. For example, it is imperative that
adequate graphics standards be established that would allow line
drawings and graphics, which characterize so many scientific and
technical publications, to be stored and shared electronically. In the
short run, failure to set such standards will cause reluctance or
difficulties in posting information to the new environment and will
cause end users greater difficulty, greater expense, or both in trying
to display the data on different kinds of machines and in different
software environments. In the long run, it will create turmoil when it
comes to storage and preservation as data get moved between different
media and operating systems.
Fortunately, many of the required standards have been or are being
developed. They include the bibliographical query and retrieval standard
Z39.50, text encoding standards such as the Standard Generalized Markup
Language (SGML ISO 8879), the SGML application for literary and
linguistic texts proposed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and
character set standards such as Unicode and ISO 10646. But there is much
work to be done in applying and refining these standards and in
developing others.
Support the development of tools to organize and search massive amounts
of information. If the new library is to become a reality, there needs
to be a simple-to-use but highly sophisticated front end, which allows
the searching of an extremely large amount of electronic information.
Recent developments such as "gophers" allow searching in today's
environments, but more powerful and sophisticated tools will become
essential if our electronic library is to be useful with far greater
amounts of information. Much of the networked information available
today is accessible only if we know where to look for it. A library
needs to have appropriate directories, finding aids, and reference
services to assist users in finding the information they seek. Ideally,
there will also be a variety of specialized bibliometric retrieval and
browsing tools to help users see what other works are available in
related areas or "slightly further down the shelf." Even though a number
of prototype projects are currently under way in a variety of research
sites, it is probably incumbent on the library both to identify the
directions it desires to go in and to fund the development of some of
the software so as to allow early users of the facility to get off to
the right start.
Socially engineer these societal changes via tax incentives. The largest
problem facing the creation of an electronic library has nothing to do
with technology. Rather, it has to do with obtaining intellectual
property. During the past decade or so, as electronic information has
grown in importance, an enormous amount of discussion has concerned
copyright law in the electronic era. While one can argue that the new
medium does not map well to the print medium, upon which the laws
governing copyright were based, it is unlikely that these laws will be
changed soon, if ever. A different solution seems in order. We should
focus instead on efforts to achieve the kind of social engineering that
is needed to create an economic and educational environment that is more
sound for the nation. If it is desirable from a national perspective to
invest in such a structure, which would support traditional education in
the K�12 and higher education structures as well as nontraditional
learning, then the government will see benefit in an investment in this
enterprise. While direct support may be a possibility, we should also
consider proposing tax incentives to encourage the owners of electronic
information to make contributions for the public good. There is a long
history of attempts to socially engineer all sorts of outcomes via tax
law. If appropriate incentives could be created to have publishers and
owners of intellectual property make contributions, then the nature of
the exchange may become simplified and probably less adversarial. Taking
a leadership position in trying to implement such legislation would
certainly be of benefit to many publishers, who happen to already own
many of the holdings that would be desired in the electronic library.
There are certainly some problems to be overcome in the area of tax
incentives. Not only would a solid case need to be made as to why the
concept advances the common good, but a number of critical logistical
issues would have to be worked out. Though they are not inconsequential
matters, they warrant attention if a new paradigm is to be developed.
Leverage the trend toward common library holdings. While the primary
focus of this venture is to provide electronic information for anyone
with access to the network, some ancillary activities will be required
to make this dream a reality. If the libraries of our colleges and
universities are to make the commitment of some significant portion of
their acquisition budget to the new electronic library, then appropriate
value and cost savings must be delineated to justify that decision. This
will certainly be a challenge in the initial years of operation, and
that is why the fees should start low and then be ramped up accordingly.
However, another possibility of providing cost savings might well be
explored. As inflationary pressures have attacked our libraries,
institutions are buying less information. Because highly specialized
information is the first to be deaccessioned, the information that is
being purchased is becoming more and more the same information across
our institutions. In other words, we are responding to a reduction in
purchasing power by buying more and more duplicative information! In
most businesses, duplication of efforts is an indicator of an arena of
potential leverage. Perhaps this means focusing the purchases of
specific electronic information on the areas represented by these common
holdings. On the other hand, there may be an opportunity for organizing
buying consortia, which could lower the "unit price" of various
materials, if the publisher were given a guarantee of some level of
revenue. If these guarantees could reduce marketing and other overhead
expenses, then the savings could be passed on to the colleges and
universities, thus freeing up money to allow participation in the
electronic library.
Conclusion
The complexities and the difficulties associated with the establishment
of a large electronic library should not be underestimated. Such a
venture is fraught with enormous problems, which will have to be dealt
with in imaginative and cooperative ways in order to meet the needs of
our society. The creation of a shared electronic library is a
revolutionary change, but an essential one if we are to effectively move
scholarship and our libraries into the twenty-first century. In the
twentieth century, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie made libraries
accessible to the public by the construction of libraries of bricks and
mortar throughout America. The legacy of libraries for the twenty-first
century must of necessity include brick and mortar but also must
increasingly focus on the storage of, archiving of, and access to
information in a variety of formats, which are transmitted
electronically and made available in a democratic and egalitarian manner
to our entire citizenry. The philanthropic contributions of Andrew
Carnegie to our nation's libraries fundamentally changed the fabric of
the country in the twentieth century, and so too might this electronic
counterpart in the twenty-first.
The library of the future will be less a place where information is kept
than a portal through which students and faculty may access the vast
information resources of the world. The new library needs to bring
together scholars and information resources without necessarily bringing
either one to a physical building with a card catalog and books. The
scholar may be at home or in the classroom or the laboratory, and the
information may be in Kyoto or Bologna or on the surface of Mars. The
library of the future will have the daunting task of helping scholars
discover what relevant information exists, anywhere in the world, and in
which variety of formats and media. The library of the future will be
about access and knowledge management, not about ownership. The hurdles
to be surmounted in creating this new electronic environment will most
likely rise from our unwillingness to break from our competitive
tendencies, our parochialism in glorifying the past, and our
unwillingness to accept the inevitability of change. Almost 150 years
ago, Thoreau suggested, "Books are the treasured wealth of the world--
the fit inheritance of generations and nations." It is yet to be
determined whether our society is committed to making that inheritance a
reality in the age of information.
*Brian Hawkins is vice president of Academic Planning and Administration
at Brown University. [email protected]
References
1. "Take a Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway,"Time,
April 12, 1993, pp. 50�58; "Building the Electronic Superhighway,"New
York Times, January 24, 1993, section 3, p. 1; Forbes ASAP, a Technology
Supplement to Forbes, March 29, 1993.
2. Richard M. Dougherty and Carol Hughes, Preferred Futures for
Libraries: A Summary of Six Workshops with University Provosts and
Library Directors. Research Libraries Group, Mountain View, Calif.,
1991.
3. Ibid.
4. Anthony M. Cummings, Marcia L. White, William G. Bowen, Laura O.
Lazarus, and Richard H. Ekman, University Libraries and Scholarly
Communication. Association of Research Libraries for the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, 1992.
5. Newton Minow, speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, May
9, 1961.
6. William J. Clinton and Albert Gore Jr. Technology for America's
Economic Growth: A New Direction to Build Economic Strength. Office of
the President of the United States, February 22, 1993.
7. Paul Evan Peters, "Making the Market for Networked Information: An
Introduction to a Proposed Program for Licensing Electronic Uses,"
Serials Review, vol. 18, No. 1-2, 1992.
Acknowledgement
A slightly different version of this paper can be found in the
proceedings of the NASIG annual conference, at which it was first
presented.
Brian Hawkins is vice president of Academic Planning and
Administration at Brown University. [email protected]