Networked Information: What Can We Expect and When? Copyright 1990 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 1990. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its dateappear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301, 303-449-4430, e-mail info@CAUSE.colorado.edu NETWORKED INFORMATION: WHAT CAN WE EXPECT AND WHEN? by Robert C. Heterick, Jr. ************************************************************************ Robert C. Heterick, Jr. is Vice President for Information Systems at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, responsible for computing, networking, and the libraries. He has served as a consultant to the Governor of Virginia, the President's Privacy Protection Study Commission, the National Academy of Sciences, and many universities and private firms. He currently serves on the EDUCOM NTTF, the OCLC Research Advisory Board, the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Networked Information, the NASULGC Higher Education Technology Committee, and advisory boards of Apple, IBM, NeXT, and Xerox, and is Chair of the CAUSE Board of Directors. ************************************************************************ ABSTRACT: Much has been written and much is known about how digital technologies will transform the library. This article describes some of the potential inhibitors of this transformation and some steps that colleges and universities can take to overcome them. Included is information about the formation of a national coalition by the Association of Research Libraries, CAUSE, and EDUCOM -- the Coalition for Networked Information. The Coalition was formed to encourage the development of information resources on the proposed National Research and Education Network (NREN). Also included are excerpts from the statement of Paul Gherman, Director of Libraries at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, before the House Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology on behalf of the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries in support of the NREN. "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present and future. As our circumstances are new, we must think anew, and act anew." -- Abraham Lincoln The library has changed little since the time of Ptolemy and the Library of Alexandria, and almost not at all since Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press nearly half a millennium ago. The maturation of a ubiquitous digital medium opens the door to all sorts of new futures for the library. Will -- and if so when will -- the library paradigm change in response to digital technology? The answer is that it has, it will continue to do so, and the changes bid fair to be revolutionary. As with all revolutions, the visionaries can fairly predict what those changes will be, but are less optimistic in attempting to foretell when and how they will occur. The major impediments to a rapid and revolutionary change in the library paradigm are cultural. This paradigm shift requires changes in legislation, public policy, and common law. It requires significant adjustments in the economic domain for both suppliers and consumers and in the global marketplace beyond our national borders. Much has been written and much is known about how digital technologies will transform the library. What are the potential inhibitors of this transformation, and what can colleges and universities do to remove them? Inhibitors to Overcome Our libraries serve as a repository and lending agency for primarily two kinds of material: monographs and serials. Monographs (or books) typically represent a record of our cultural heritage and are packaged so as to be convenient to carry around, to store, and to read from a variety of positions for extended periods of time. Serials (magazines and journals) are typically ephemeral and carry brief, sectionalized reading segments that are quickly read and discarded in short time periods by all but libraries. The distinction is important in attempting to ascertain the time period in which inhibitors to a new library paradigm will be overcome. Clearly, applications of the new digital technologies will come more rapidly to serials than to monographs. In the repository sense, there are data over a long period of time to indicate that the holdings of a major research library will double in a 10-to-15-year time span. This expansion rate seems to continue to be the same, irrespective of the growth of the information stock available. That is to say, the information explosion of the last three decades has not significantly impacted the growth of collections primarily because library funding has not kept pace. The consequences for an academic research library are predictable. What are probably already the largest buildings on campus can be expected to double in size every 10 to 15 years. If for no other reason than to blunt this exponential increase in physical size, libraries will need to find a way to serve their patrons without being repositories for some significant segment of the world's information stock in the form of physical artifacts. In the short term, this predictable increase in needed space will be handled by high density, probably off-site storage. In the longer term, it will be dealt with by storing material in a digital, electronic format. When there are networked computer devices with local printers accessible to a significant segment of library patrons, we will have print-on-demand production of artifacts. Certainly, for the next ten years at least, our focus will be on the former -- high density storage. The automation that has already appeared in the library started, as do most automation efforts, in the backroom operation with acquisition and cataloging. Work at the Library of Congress and the rise of utilities such as the Online College Library Center (OCLC) have done much to define the formats and protocols for creating and sharing catalog records. National and international standards organizations are just now considering protocols and formats for the principal user interface -- the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). It is interesting that even at this late date there is only one operational implementation of the Z39.50 search protocol for doing, among other things, a keyword search through library catalogs and full text. The small and fragmented nature of the library software community has significantly slowed the development of standard tools for end-user searching. We can expect solutions to the search problem in the next several years and standard implementations in the next decade. Experience shows that we should expect, as a consequence, increased demand for delivery of the search target to the user's workstation. Some of the major university campuses already have a sufficient population of personal computers and workstations in the hands of library patrons to make this a feasible project. However, most don't and probably won't for nearly a decade. Even on those campuses where workstation delivery is a feasible goal, we must first solve the problem of a base of full text material in machine-readable form. While there are a number of useful and important information sources in electronic form, they hardly represent a fraction of 1 percent of the information stock currently housed in our academic libraries. At the moment there are not sufficient incentives to encourage publishers of serials to convert to distribution in electronic format. In fact, there are a large number of disincentives that explicitly discourage movement in that direction. Higher education institutions have formed consortia to install intercampus communications networks that will connect to the proposed National Research and Education Network (NREN) -- an advanced computer network intended to interconnect more than 1,000 colleges, universities, and research organizations (see sidebar). For example, in my own state, the infrastructure represented by the Virginia Education and Research Network (VERnet) is a start toward a mechanism that will permit Virginia educational institutions to share full text and bibliographic records. In the southeastern region of the U.S., SURAnet performs a similar service for states from Delaware to Florida. Probably the most critical problem inhibiting a paradigm change is the current status of copyright law. The problem is far too complex to summarize here. Suffice it to say that copyright law was created before the rapid dissemination and copying of information in electronic form was possible. Educational institutions, more than other segments of our society, are keenly protective of intellectual property rights. Any movement to make major alterations in copyright law will require a major national consensus. Such a consensus has not yet developed and is likely to be many years in forming. The widespread sharing of full text awaits appropriate changes in copyright law. Even the simple sharing of a document between two libraries can be subject to extreme restrictions under copyright -- much as "fair use" has exacerbated the problems in using copy machines. The classic economic model of the library has been that of a "public good" whose services were free. This economic model developed in a far simpler time when we dealt only with the artifacts stored locally for a local clientele. There now exist a plethora of commercial information providers who charge for access to organized and indexed data. In fact, federal government information policies tilt significantly toward making information available to these commercial ventures for resale to the general public and library community. Clearly, these value-added commercial servers have a role to play in our library paradigm. Just as clearly, we cannot count on a geographic choke on how much information can be requested. This puts libraries at a distinct disadvantage in attempting to perpetuate a "public good" model. A single electronic subscriber could easily create tens of thousands of dollars of real costs to a library without ever entering the physical building or borrowing a single artifact. There is no provision in the funding mechanism for libraries to support the cost of pushing the "public good" model into the age of electronic, for- profit, database access. What Can Libraries Do? There are a number of actions that academic libraries can take to ameliorate the financial pinch in which they find themselves and to take advantage of the early stages of the technological revolution occurring around them. * Implement policies that favor access over acquisition, and favor the electronic version of shareable material over multiple hard copies of the same material. An informal consortium of academic libraries could choose several sites as repositories for electronic full text (databases such as ERIC, Agricola, and PsychLit) and cease expanding shelf space required by the paper copies of those materials. Academic networks could be developed as the medium by which rapid dissemination of this material can be made to "end users" on campuses across the area served by the consortium. Government and private industry support could be solicited to help fund these centers to install and support the search engines required. * Implement policies that favor high-density storage over expansion of current library facilities. The overriding issue for any academic library is the ability to place the desired document in the hands of the patron in a reasonable length of time. For libraries that support an OPAC, this may mean 24 hours or less from the call to receipt time. Current thinking is that the costs and inabilities to meet the time demands militate against this as a viable approach. A formal study should be undertaken to confirm or deny this perception. * Seriously consider the advantages of a union catalog for academic libraries in a defined region. In much the same way that airline reservation systems can be biased for a particular airline's flights, the union catalog could be biased for the local institution's holdings. The library patron would see on his or her OPAC the holdings of the local library first, the holdings of the repository libraries second. With or without timely interlibrary loans already mentioned, a far richer resource of material would be available to all the academic institutions in the region. The OLIS (Ohio Library & Information System) project is an example of a major effort in this direction. * Encourage appropriate government officials to investigate and help shape copyright law interpretations. In the long term, copyright law will prove to be the major barrier to widespread sharing of library materials. Academic librarians need clear legal guidelines on how far they can push the copyright laws. They may also need to focus attention, perhaps through a test case, on such inhibitors to a more widespread sharing of material. * Support the efforts of the Coalition for Networked Information (described below) to bring an increased richness of digitally encoded material onto our academic networks, and support the efforts of the National Telecommunications Task Force in encouraging the creation and federal funding of the National Research and Education Network. In summary, a paradigm shift for libraries is under way. Its full development awaits the resolution of a number of thorny societal problems. Libraries must look to state and federal governments for help in resolving copyright and "fee for service vs. public good" issues, and networks must become populated not only with bibliographic offerings of libraries, but with full text. Coalition for Networked Information Formed Critical to the library paradigm shift is cooperation among the library, computing, and communications communities, who must see themselves as part of a system whose whole is more than the sum of its parts. Already on many campuses cooperative efforts of computing organizations and libraries are under way. Examples of ongoing projects include the Z39.50 project being developed jointly by Penn State and the University of California system, the Scholarly Communications Project at Virginia Tech, the Networked Library System at the University of Wisconsin, and Cornell's digital preservation project. These kinds of cooperative efforts point to a promising future -- the creation of a "virtual library" to give researchers electronic access to nationwide and worldwide information resources. As momentum builds for the establishment of the National Research and Education Network, the potential magnifies for a rich information environment to serve thousands of educators, researchers, and scholars. Meeting that goal will require a major collaborative effort by those with the knowledge, skills, and resources to address the policy, technical, operational, and economic challenges implicit in a national electronic information infrastructure. Such a collaborative effort is embodied in the newly formed Coalition for Networked Information, founded by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE, and EDUCOM. The Coalition, whose formation was announced at NET'90 in Washington, D.C., in March, will promote the provision of information resources on existing networks and on proposed interconnected networks. The linkage of libraries to these networks and, thereby, to each other and their respective constituencies, is an important early priority of the Coalition. The Coalition will also address a host of related public policy issues such as intellectual property rights, standards, licensing, servicing arrangements, charging algorithms and cost recovery fees, and economic models. The work of the Coalition will be accomplished through a Task Force composed of institutions of higher education, not-for-profit organizations, and corporate sponsors. Institutions joining the Task Force will appoint two individuals -- one senior administrator representing the libraries and one senior administrator representing information technologies. Member institutions and Task Force members will volunteer significant support to the Coalition and its activities. Others forms of participation will be introduced as the Coalition and Task Force evolve. Over seventy institutions have already committed to joining the Task Force of the Coalition for Networked Information, and the Coalition has already received significant leadership contributions from four corporate sponsors: Apple, Digital, IBM, and Xerox[1] Is it reasonable to expect that libraries will cease being primarily repositories for printed artifacts and will become access facilitators --pathfinders and navigators to a rich, worldwide information base? The answer is yes. Yes, because it is better for their patrons, and yes, because it is the only response available to pressing economic dysfunction in an increasingly global, networked, pluralistic, and computerized economy. It is fair to observe that libraries are in the midst of a significant cultural change. As a campus wag once observed, "Changing cultures is a lot like moving a cemetery -- a very grave occurrence." ======================================================================== Footnote 1 For information about joining the Task Force of the Coalition for Networked Information, contact: Paul Evan Peters, Director, Coalition for Networked Information, c/o Association of Research Libraries, 1527 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; phone (202) 232- 2466. ======================================================================== Information Resources on the NREN For the past few years, the EDUCOM project known as the Networking and Telecommunications Task Force (NTTF) has been encouraging the establishment of a national network for education and research. Last year, the results of these efforts began to bear fruit, with the introduction of identical legislation in both houses of Congress. The "National High Performance Computer Technology Act of 1989," introduced as S.1067 by Senator Albert Gore (D-TN) and as H.R.3131 by Representative Doug Walgren (D-PA), describes the development of a National Research and Education Network (NREN) to enhance national competitiveness and productivity through a high-speed, high-quality network infrastructure supporting a broad set of services for research and instruction. Federal action is considered necessary to integrate the piecemeal networking efforts of many different private and public sector organizations, and to develop the higher-performance technologies needed by researchers. The Bush administration has endorsed the concept of the NREN, and corporate and public sector coalitions have formed to promote it. In March of this year, the Coalition for Networked Information was formed by the Association of Research Libraries, CAUSE, and EDUCOM, to encourage development of information resources on the NREN and study issues such as standards, intellectual property rights, copyright, and the management and funding of the network. The Coalition identified three major factors influencing the need for the NREN: * The growing emphasis on access to information resources. It is no longer possible for any one library to build a comprehensive collection. Cooperative resource sharing among libraries -- enhanced by use of the NREN -- will provide researchers with access to a comprehensive collection. * Availability of information resources regardless of the location of either the user or the information product itself. A number of cooperative programs have been established to identify, organize, and provide access to information resources nationally and internationally, establishing the foundation for the next generation -- an electronic directory for the "virtual library." * Integration of campus information resources. There is a growing appreciation for the need to coordinate library resources and capabilities with information technology resources and capabilities, particularly computing and networking. ************************************************************************ Libraries in Support of the NREN The following text is excerpted from the statement of Paul Gherman, Director of Libraries at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, before the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology, The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, on H.R .3131, March 15, 1990, on behalf of the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). * "It is time ... that we establish a new paradigm for scholarly communication ... . We must shift emphasis from ownership of information to access to information. The NREN can be an integral part of implementing such a system ... . * "In the future ... readers will have access to the world of knowledge instead of just the materials held in their local library ... Already over twenty-five library catalogs are available on the existing connected network, which is the Internet ... . The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, CARL, a consortium of multi-type libraries, not only lists what books are available in their libraries, but has online on the Internet a database of tables of contents from over 7,000 journals ... . * "One example of an excellent resource that could be made available on the NREN is the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). OCLC, a membership organization of libraries, provides online access to a database of over 21 million bibliographic records and can identify over 350 million individual book locations. OCLC has recently made available a service that gives the individual scholar or library patron access to this enormous wealth of knowledge ... . * "Likewise, the Research Libraries Group, RLG, a membership organization of many large research libraries based at Stanford, is offering access to its database via the Internet. RLG is also planning to use its dedicated network at night to send large volumes of fax transmissions to speed the delivery of interlibrary loan material. * "Daily, thousands of pages of interlibrary loan materials are telefaxed between libraries using high-cost commercial telephone lines. Experimentation at Ohio State and at the University of California is showing how telefax machines may be able to send page images over the Internet. If these tests are successful, it will then be possible to send interlibrary loans directly to the requestor's workstation. The use of the NREN will be critical to the success of such a system. * "The NREN holds the potential to connect the researcher to a number of specialized databases that are not textual or bibliographic ... . NSF has funded a project ... to develop a spatial database which will allow scientists throughout the nation to identify ... [satellite] images. Eventually these images could be digitized and transmitted via the NREN ... . * "There is discussion that could lead to a consortium of universities sharing the cost of mounting databases which would be too expensive for a single university to maintain. Government databases such as Agricola, in the field of agriculture, or ERIC, in education, could be placed on one university's computer and accessed by a number of other universities. This would save the duplicate cost of storing the data and software to access the database. We envision a partnership between various universities and government agencies to disseminate government information via the NREN, much as the current depository library system works ... . * "The older collections of our nation's libraries are literally falling apart due to the acidic nature of the paper used in printing during the last 100 years ... . One has to believe that one day soon we will have the technology to store these valuable books in electronic form. When that day comes, the NREN could serve as the means of access to these important collections by scholars across the nation ... . * "Before we can realize this future, a significant rethinking of intellectual property rights and copyright law must be undertaken. We in the library community realize that publishers are very concerned about protecting their interests in this new environment, but we cannot cling to the paper world of scholarly communication ... . Management and funding of the NREN is also of great concern to the library community. Questions such as what we mean by commercialization, how we charge for differing services, and how the transition will be made from our current form of management to a future management form, are a few examples of those concerns ... . * "I believe the vision the library community has presented here today sees in the NREN the possibility of transforming the very basis of scholarly communication in our nation. This vision offers a new efficiency, quality, and speed by which information can be accessed, which will give this nation a competitive edge as we develop new advances in science, technology, and medicine." ************************************************************************ Networked Information: What Can We Expect and When?