IN AN
INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
ANNEX 1: PROGRAMME
ANNEX 2: DELEGATES
ANNEX 3: GLOSSARY OF ACRONYMS AND TERMS
The Coalition for Networked Information was founded in March 1990 to promote the creation and use of networked information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity. The Coalition is a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE (see below), and Educom. A task force of over 200 institutions and organisations provides the Coalition with insights, initiatives, and resources to pursue its mission. Members of the task force include higher education institutions, publishers, network service providers, computer companies, library networks and organisations, and public and state libraries. It is a truly diverse partnership of institutions and organisations with a common interest in realising the promise of networked information resources and services.
CAUSE is the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. An international non-profit association, CAUSE's mission is to enable the transformational changes occurring in higher education through the effective management and use of information resources - technology, services, and information. The CAUSE membership includes more than 1,300 campuses and other educational organisations from all regions of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and several other countries - as well as 73 corporate members. Nearly 3,700 individuals participate in CAUSE as member representatives from their institutions.
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and contains over one hundred and fifty million items representing every age of written civilisation. The British Library exists to serve scholarship, research and innovation. It is the national archive of monographs and serials received by legal deposit. It provides Reading Room and enquiry services, as well as a range of document supply services for remote users. The Library's Initiatives for Access programme is looking at how new digital and networking technologies can expand the use of its rich collections.
The British Library Research and Development Department is the main UK funding agency for research in the library and information field. It supports and disseminates the results of a wide range of projects. The Department has a number of other activities, including administering grants for cataloguing and preservation, research in the book world and special initiatives for the Department of National Heritage.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) was established on 1 April 1993 by the Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland and Wales, and is now also supported by the Department of Education for Northern Ireland (DENI). The mission for JISC is "to stimulate and enable the cost effective exploitation of information systems and to provide a high quality national infrastructure for the UK higher education and research councils' communities".
The main objectives of JISC are:
The UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) and its antecedent organisations have been based at the University of Bath for the last 18 years. It supports the UK library and information communities through research, co-ordination and awareness, and information services in the area of network information management. It has recently expanded and developed a work programme around distributed library and information systems, resource discovery and metadata, bibliographic management and public library networking. At the same time it is expanding its network information and event organisation services. UKOLN is funded by the British Library Research and Development Department and by JISC. Further information about UKOLN and its activities can be found at URL: http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk
As Sir Brian Follett reminds us in his opening presentation, the bits and bytes which constitute networked information are no respecters of international boundaries. Any issues concerning the effective use of network-based information or resources truly are best dealt with internationally; and there is no shortage of issues. This conference confirmed the high level of interest in issues to do with production, distribution, management and preservation of digital resources; and that there is a strong desire to identify, face and overcome these issues. Fortunately, the wish to resolve such problems is as international as the problems. As Lynne Brindley pointed out in her welcoming address, the significance of the event was marked symbolically in two ways: first by the international connotations of the venue, Heathrow; and second by the integrative nature of the programme being represented by the sponsorship of the event by five leading institutions: The British Library, CNI, CAUSE and JISC.
The main part of the conference consisted of 18 formal presentations (see Annex 1 for the complete programme). Four were on general topics, giving perspectives of some important developments in the UK and the complex and changing cost modelling issues which concern us all. The other presentations described a varied sample of specific projects. The projects cover a range of subjects; they are grouped under the following five headings:
The presentations, and the conference as a whole, was marked by impressively high levels of energy and participation, as Paul Evan Peters remarked. I hope that this report conveys the sense of excitement and progress which was evident during the conference.
The remainder of this report consists primarily of accounts of the conference presentations. The accounts were prepared by consultants. They are not formal papers written by the speakers, though in many cases notes, slides and other materials were provided by the speakers. In all cases, speakers were offered the opportunity to review the account of their presentation.
In keeping with its subject matter, the organisers have decided to publish this report primarily on the Internet rather than on paper. This has the benefit of allowing us to represent speakers' references by means of hyperlinks rather than by mere static footnotes on paper. As some of the references will evolve during the period in which this report is of interest, this adds value by ensuring that the most up to date material is available. Of course, there is an accompanying potential disadvantage, namely that some of the referenced material will be taken off the network or will be moved to a different URL; an apposite illustration of one of the significant issues facing users of networked information!
The use of networks, and the amount of information on the Internet is growing very rapidly; by some measures at a rate which is more than logarithmic [1] . There is general agreement that scholarly resources are used internationally. However, it is notable that although many projects and initiatives presented at the conference could have world-wide relevance, interest and impact, the majority are essentially national in their organisation. This underlines the importance of an international event such as this conference; it provided a valuable opportunity for practitioners from several countries to share experiences. Paul Evan Peters expressed, in the closing session, the hope that the discussions which took place might give rise to joint initiatives building on the strengths of the existing national projects; this conference was one way in which synergy can usefully be encouraged , and others should actively be sought in order to maximise and distribute the benefits of work in this field.
Finally, I want to express thanks to the speakers who all tolerantly supplied notes, slides and other materials to help generate this report. I hope that they find their ideas are expressed accurately, and that they will forgive any omissions by abbreviation. Thanks are also due to my colleague Mike Arblaster, who assisted in the preparation of several of the accounts; to Isobel Stark, who applied the HTML tags; and to Hazel Gott of UKOLN who, as chief organiser of this conference, patiently contended with a stream of requests for details and clarifications during the preparation of this report.
[1] See, for example, URL http://www.nw.com/
This account was prepared for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy. It is an edited version of a paper supplied by the speaker.
This presentation starts by covering some of the background to the University Libraries Review. Next it examines some of the follow-up activities resulting from the Libraries review focusing especially on the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) and the Anderson report. It concludes with a brief look at future hopes for the programme.
This paper is presented in the context of an international conference. Development of the Electronic Library (or the Digital Library) must be an international activity. Individuals need passports and visas to get into or out of Britain. Our goods and chattels need customs clearances. But our bits and bytes respect no formalities, going where we send them, and sometimes where we do not. Our laws and our institutions are territorial, bits and bytes are not. We must work together to ensure we can understand and use them.
Ariadne, a new electronic journal for libraries, was launched earlier this year in the UK. The original Ariadne, daughter of a king of Crete, features in a mythological tale which involves Theseus. In this tale, Theseus gratefully uses information supplied by Ariadne to find his way through the Minotaur's labyrinth, but he later is unwilling to pay the price, and abandons Ariadne. Vice-Chancellors and Funding Council members might sometimes be compared with Theseus, having often been viewed as unwilling to pay the price to maintain university libraries. The launch of Ariadne, however, signifies that they are prepared to pay their share, as explained below.
In 1992 the newly formed Higher Education Funding Councils asked the speaker to chair an enquiry into libraries in higher education. At that time universities were in a time of tremendous expansion. The number of students in UK universities increased by 57% between 1988 and 1992. This was very welcome, but it exacerbated the pressures for university libraries, for during this period, library provision increased very little. How could we support these students? At the same time, the ex-polytechnics became universities. How could they meet their research aspirations without research libraries? Meanwhile, the infamous journals price spiral was threatening research collections even in well-established universities.
The review group decided to report quickly and pragmatically, rather than going back to basics. After 12 months work by the Review group and its 3 sub-groups, it reported in November 1993 with what has become known as the Follett Report. It came up with 46 recommendations to the Funding Councils covering virtually all parts of the library from space issues to the electronic future.
The four higher education funding councils accepted virtually all the recommendations, turning down only one: funds for inter-library co-operation. In all they set aside close to £100 million for implementation, and we have been very busy over the last two years. HEFCE "believes the report was a very successful document, suggesting pragmatic solutions for some of the major issues facing UK HE libraries". The speaker suggests it worked because the report not only identified an area of worrying neglect but also offered some practical solutions. The outcomes of the report are described below.
Perhaps the most visible and enduring result of the report will be the buildings programme. Across the country about £200 million was spent on 70 projects (about £150M from universities plus about £50M from the funding councils). This will produce spaces for about 250,000 readers, many IT-equipped, in 70 institutions. The first of these, in Southampton, is to open officially in March 1996.
The Review concentrated internationally on Arts and Humanities subjects; the focus was small to ensure that the results would be valid. Many libraries contain special collections of great importance to researchers in the humanities, but which are not widely known. In this part of the programme, we are funding projects to conserve, catalogue and preserve some of these collections. We will also do work on making information on archives accessible over the network.
The total cost of this over 5 years comes to £32 million. There is a provision to review the programme after 3 years, since many important collections are still not being funded.
As mentioned above, the journals price spiral was one of the motivators for the Review. One of the options explored was for the licensing of copyright material under more favourable conditions. This would include unlimited copying on site, including for course packs, as well as electronic access.
The funding councils agreed to set up a UK-wide Pilot Site Licence initiative for three years starting in January 1996. The publishers selected for the pilot include Academic Press, Blackwells Publishing, Blackwells Science and Institute of Physics Publishing. In exchange for a central payment by the funding bodies, all the journals would be made available in both print and electronic form at a substantial discount. This initiative has a particularly democratic aspect: all universities, old and new, will have the same access.
This has been one of the most controversial proposals. The funding councils were rather sceptical. Librarians have been extremely suspicious. Publishers not involved are furious about it.
Final negotiations have proved very difficult. Undoubtedly there will be problems, and it may well not be the right way to go. But it is worth a try. Let this pilot be used to find out what the pros and cons really are.
Problems of copyright raise difficult and controversial issues.
We were extremely encouraged by the reports from the AAU/ARL working parties on intellectual property that came out last year. We hoped for a while that if we in the UK also took a similar line, that we might be able to do something about the copyright paradox. That is, universities paying to create the work, giving it away, then paying publishers again to buy it back for our libraries.
The speaker visited the AAU in May last year with two colleagues. It was clear from that visit that both sides of the Atlantic are finding these issues intractable. It is a difficult area for university Presidents or Vice-Chancellors to take concerted action. We need a continuing dialogue with our American colleagues. I strongly doubt that CVCP (Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals) can take effective action on its own so we need some sort of forum for international action.
Given this lack of progress , the publishers still have us over a barrel. It is crucial that arrangements are made that recognise the delicate economic balance that exists between players in the HE community. If this is not recognised, universities and academics are very likely to by-pass traditional scholarly communications methods altogether.
Recently, things seem to have got worse, with the publication in the US of the White Paper on Copyright and the NII. This report appears highly oriented towards the rights holders and away from the traditional balance of copyright. We are very concerned that the proposed legislation in the US should not form a precedent for other parts of the world.
We have recently published a collection of papers on copyright, on the network as well as in print. As usual, this collection provides more questions than answers.
Most IT-related activities of these took place under the aegis of the Joint Information Systems Committee, otherwise known as JISC.
JISC's main role is to organise JANET/SuperJANET, our academic network, but it already had a substantial programme funding datasets and datacentres. An early endeavour was BIDS, which started with the national site licence for the ISI database several years ago. Next came MIDAS, hosting statistical and similar datasets, and more recently EDINA, a second site for bibliographic and other datasets.
JISC recommended that funds should be provided to establish an Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS). This will be a distributed service, with an executive based at King's College, London and headed by Dan Greenstein. The resources provided will be hosted by the universities where they originated, and where the expertise to maintain them lies. This corresponds to a "classical" digital libraries format, where materials remain in universities and are accessed by Internet.
We expect that a significant component of these resources will be images, and will be linked to other work relating to images in the electronic libraries programme.
The Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL, a group of a dozen or so of our larger university libraries) has for years been bringing together the bibliographic databases from its members. However, the resulting database needed a lot of work. We persuaded the funding councils to provide funds for the development of this database as a national resource, with an associated document delivery service. This work is underway at Manchester.
We wanted to know if a major national retrospective catalogue conversion programme was justified. The report we commissioned is quite convincing on the benefits of that conversion. We have about 11 million records in electronic form in our university libraries. We need to convert over 25 million more. In theory this means that more than two thirds of the material in our libraries can be discovered only by inspecting card or other hard copy catalogues.
The problem is the cost. This is estimated at £50 million, made up of £25 million from central sources plus matching funding from the universities. This is going to be difficult to fund given the funding pressures and we are not sure how to cope with this, beyond spending a small amount each year attacking key parts of the problem. One thing is certain: decisions of this nature need to be linked to a national strategy. Initiatives in this area will give shape to prioritising collections for conversion and help to emphasise collections of national significance.
Now we come to one of the most significant developments, the Electronic Libraries Programme, eLib (a digital libraries programme as it might be called in the United States).
eLib is managed by an Implementation Group for IT (FIGIT), chaired by Lynne Brindley. FIGIT is a sub-committee of the JISC. The programme is directed by Chris Rusbridge, who has chosen to base himself at Warwick, where he is supported by Kelly Russell.
FIGIT has released two calls for proposals: one in July 1994 and one in November 1995. The initial call was divided into seven programme areas, and the second call into four areas.
Elib projects are quite different from the NSF/NASA/ARPA digital library projects. These are six huge, integrated projects each looking at many different aspects of the digital library. In contrast eLib, about the same size in cash terms, has funded over 50 projects to date. These are mostly small - aiming for deliverables over the next three years or so. The projects involve more than 85 different HE institutions. Overall it is a pragmatic programme, with relatively short term projects. With this scope, eLib could represent an important step toward broad based cultural change.
The programme areas of the first call are examined below.
Having concentrated in part on the arts and humanities, we also initiated document delivery projects, some of which are particularly relevant to science and technology.
In document delivery, we aimed first of all to test different models in a networked, distributed environment. Most document delivery in the UK is sourced from the British Library's Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa. We wanted to make more use of our own resources. LAMDA is a project using RLG's ARIEL software to undertake document delivery between universities in the London area and a group in Manchester.
We are also funding two major systems development projects for paper-based documents. One of these is dual language: English and Welsh. We have also agreed to join with Australian and New Zealand partners to commission enhancements to ARIEL. Finally in this area is the InfoBike project, which will provide document delivery from electronic-sourced documents.
In the electronic journals area, we are funding twelve projects. Two of these, CLIC and Internet Archaeology, are described in other papers in this report. Others range from support for learned society publishers moving to electronic formats, to the second SuperJournal project. This has a consortium of 20 publishers, in various disciplines. The project plans to test a selection of off-the-shelf interfaces, carrying out a series of user behaviour studies. These studies will then be evaluated to determine the way users interact with clusters of journals from these publishers.
Digitisation has proved to be a difficult area, and it has taken time to clarify and develop thinking in this area. We thought we might be able to release some space by digitising long runs of out-of-copyright material. Despite getting a good number of proposals, we have only funded two digitisation projects to date, and only one of these (from Oxford and Leeds) deals with early journals. The second deals with recent journals in the area of design. The motivation here is not space but conservation. Students in this area apparently steal not just pages or volumes, but entire runs of journals! We can only hope that they will not resort to stealing instead PCs or workstations...
These modest test projects have been funded to provide experience and insight into the technological and economic issues of digitisation. It seems clear now that the most appropriate model is a central digitisation facility (possibly in co-operation with the private sector) which would negotiate copyright clearance and provide off-site expert evaluation services. We would like to fund such a centre, though it is not yet certain that all necessary technologies are mature enough.
On Demand publishing is the practice of printing short runs of publications - sometimes extremely short runs - when they are needed, rather than the more traditional practice of printing large runs and keeping stocks awaiting demand. An examination of this area shows how conservative, book-oriented, teaching is currently.
On Demand Publishing is one programme area where the major emphasis throughout has been on the teaching and learning benefits. We have funded seven projects. Most have a print-on-paper emphasis, but a few, notably the ERIMS project in management studies and the Liverpool John Moores project in the humanities, have an electronic basis. These projects are generally all having difficulties with getting publishers' rights cleared at a reasonable price. Publishers seem determined to kill off a promising market.
We have always believed that training and awareness is a vital area. We have funded six projects here, generally quite different from one another. Netskills is our main skills improvement project, based on the group at Newcastle who provided training through the Mailbase project. We also have EduLib, aiming to upgrade the educational competencies of librarians. There are three projects which are practically based, but essentially studies.
Finally there is the recently-launched Ariadne. This is a print and network-based newsletter which was initiated earlier in 1996. It aims to stimulate discussion in the library community, and should achieve that, from its first issue.
It is notoriously difficult to find resources on the Internet. One approach we are taking is the creation of subject-based gateways. Another paper in this report describes the SOSIG gateway project; there are a further six gateways and one technology project in this area.
We always expected there would be useful work which was difficult to categorise. The supporting studies area brings these together. We have three projects, looking at the economics of document delivery, at cultural change, and at problems of resource discovery (refer to the paper on ROADS herein). There have also been shorter studies on existing digitisation projects, on the need for an images data service, and on technologies for copyright management.
Images have been mentioned more than once above. FIGIT received quite a number of image-based proposals in its first call but chose to wait for an images scoping study it had funded. That document is now out for consultation, and FIGIT has taken it as a framework for awarding three significant projects, covering very different areas: digital maps, medical images and photographic images of historical interest. These are very new.
The second call asked for proposals in pre-prints and grey literature, in quality assurance and in electronic reserve. These areas were addressing gaps where the initial response was not felt adequate. Pre-prints or grey literature lend themselves particularly well to an electronic environment. None of their timeliness is lost in processing or postal delays. We have agreed four projects in this area, and this is the first public announcement of support for a pre-print service in the cognitive sciences, directed by Stevan Harnad. This is an area in which the UK may take a world-wide lead.
Quality assurance projects will work to develop working models for refereeing in an electronic environment. The successful project is concerned more with streamlining peer review in than new models of quality assurance. It could prove very complementary to work in electronic journals and pre-prints. One can perhaps envisage further work on a system that moves materials directly from a pre-print via a refereeing environment into an e-journal.
The electronic reserve projects take our on-demand publishing work one stage further. There are some very interesting projects here, including some vital software for tracking access to copyright materials. There is also a project on delivering access to music and video as electronic reserve materials, for dance
Naturally, there are numerous sources of information about eLib:
A famous British writer, Terry Pratchett, has written a whole series of science fiction stories about his imaginary Discworld. This world has many extraordinary parallels with our own. In these stories, the Librarian at the Unseen University has been changed through some unfortunate magical accident to an orang-utan. He could be changed back, but the magical books he looks after are so dangerous that he chooses to remain as an orang-utan. It may be hard to communicate when you entire vocabulary is Ook, but I have heard of librarians in our universities who feel that very long arms and orange fur would help in dealing with their clients!
In one story (Guards! Guards!) the Librarian uses a thread, like Theseus, to find his way back from an expedition deep into his library. The density of knowledge is so great that it distorts space-time. He manages to find his way to a point a week ago, before a critical book had been stolen. After reading it he carefully replaces it and retraces his step to the present, following the thread. Presumably some of our librarians wish they could do that, too!
In another book (Small Gods), he makes the suggestion that this distortion of space-time is so great that all Libraries everywhere are connected, in "L-space". The Librarian is thus able to rescue some books from the centre of a burning library in another city.
This idea that all Libraries are - or should be - connected, is one of the central ideas of the Anderson Report. Michael Anderson looked at the problem of support for research, and essentially decided that we absolutely have to co-operate and collaborate. We have highly competitive institutions, but we must find ways to develop some sort of national strategy for co-ordinated support for research - a strategy that includes the national libraries. This is especially important in the UK with our numerous smallish universities and libraries. This idea underpins out thinking on the national distributed collection (print and electronic). We know also that we must go far beyond connecting OPACs in providing simple means to find our information resources.
The Anderson Report also raised the issue of preservation of digital information. We are all familiar with the fate of the fabled Alexandria Library, and probably also the medieval monastic library in Umberto Eco's book The Name of the Rose (this library was also a labyrinth, this time to protect the monks from the knowledge in some books). It was not clear until a few years ago that digital information might be similarly vulnerable. Now we realise that the move to digital information - an inexorable move, it seems - brings new and unique problems in preservation. In the US, the Commission for Preservation and Access has been considering this for some time. They wrote an excellent draft report with the RLG [1]. We have now taken our first steps to play our part in resolving these difficulties, with a workshop at Warwick last year [2]. Unless we continue to support this work vigorously, it will inhibit taking advantage of the new methods of scholarly communication.
So where do we go from here? We have a significant programme of projects under way. The projects are sometimes described as a set of experiments. We now have to start looking for ways to make these experiments practical realities in our libraries. We must look wider than the UK, and try to integrate our work with overseas projects - whatever we can find that is useful.
So the first plank of our future strategy is to select some projects, then to embark on scaling up, integration and implementation, with wide dissemination and real efforts at cultural change. We should aim to get the results implemented across many or all libraries. In order to maintain the flow of funding, we shall have to "deliver results".
The second plank is to build on the ideas from the Anderson report. We must try to increase library collaboration. We want to be able to find documents wherever they are.
The third and final plank of the strategy is to try to make some real progress - backed by real money - in the emerging area of digital preservation.
We have not got all the funds we need to implement this strategy.
As a result of the Libraries Review, we have some very substantial programmes funded. This may not be everything we could wish for, but there is plenty to get on with. The eLib programme is the key development. It will have a major effect on cultural change in universities. We need to go further with this if we can get the funding to do so.
The organisation of HE in the UK means we can have a national strategy. Electronic library developments will only happen in this way.
We want to see eLib and other national programmes such as TLTP, etc. developing an holistic approach to teaching and learning. At the same time, we have to try to collaborate more in support of research.
It is important to keep relationships with the USA strong - particular areas include digital preservation, licensing and copyright.
We could view our world as a multi-dimensional labyrinth. In different ways as funders, Vice-Chancellors, Librarians and as users, we are all faced with a different maze of difficult choices. How do we find our way? We need whatever guides we can find. Let us hope we treat our Ariadne better than Theseus did.
[1] Draft report available at URL
http://www-rlg.stanford.edu/ArchTF/
and by FTP at server lyra.stanford.edu/pub/ArchTF/
[2] Report available at URL
http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/fresko/
This account was drafted for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy. It is based on notes taken during the presentation and notes supplied by the speaker.
For many years the main support agency for Information Technology applications in library information services, The British Library Research and Development Department, has had a long-term interest in networking. The founding of UKOLN, by the addition of networking to the existing bibliographic management research centre at Bath, set up a powerful facility for awareness, advice, research and standards. UKOLN initially concentrated on the academic sector, but, with encouragement from The British Library, has since extended its operations to all types of library. The Research and Development Department itself has undertaken a number of projects in non-academic libraries and its plans for the future give a high priority to this area.
The British Library is the main United Kingdom funding agency for research in the Library and Information field. Even so, funds are limited - the 1995/6 budget being only £1.6 million. They are also spread over a wide range of topics, such as information policy, user studies, education, training and awareness, and across all communities, not just the academic. In addition, technology is applicable to information handling in all information services, not just libraries. The British Library has had to live with dwindling resources in real terms (the equivalent to the 1979 level of funding would be £3.6 million today) and the trend looks set to continue. Much tighter focusing in the future is therefore inevitable.
In view of the funding position, collaborations and partnerships with other funding sources are always very welcome. The Library has also become involved in functions which are tantamount to management of research and development funds for other bodies - in particular, various public library development schemes for the Department of National Heritage.
The Follett initiative to put resources into university library research and development is very much appreciated, especially at a time when the smaller scale projects of the type generally supported by The British Library in this area were no longer sufficient to address needs.
Nevertheless a great deal of library research projects have been supported, which in retrospect can be seen as precursors to the present eLib programme. Some of these are described below.
BLEND, the Birmingham and Loughborough Electronic Networking Development, was undertaken in the first half of the 1980s and constituted a very early attempt to set up an electronic journal. Although the technology was crude by today's standards, many new ideas were tested. The basis of the project was an electronic conferencing system, which set up a community linked together by communications (with all of the attributes of a present-day networked community), including e-mail, and the journal arose as a by-product.
University College London and the University of Hertfordshire joined them in a subsequent project, the former bringing expertise in integrating text, sound and graphics in electronic documents, the latter bringing extensive research on optical media. The quartet of universities combined to investigate electronic document handling, with a view to developing practical applications from the research. One of these was a researcher's workstation, but in the event this was superseded by external developments resulting from the rapid progress of technology, currently rendering products obsolescent every two years or so.
More recently the University of Loughborough, with Institute of Physics Publishing, has delivered an electronic physics journal, and University College London has networked the American Chemical Society Journals.
The De Montfort University set up an electronic library on the Milton Keynes campus, with support from The British Library, eLib and the European Commission. They also collaborated with the Nara Institute in Japan and with NACSIS, which provides an academic network similar to JANET.
A call for proposals in 1987 led to a range of research projects investigating retrieval from image databases.
Many information technology projects have a networking aspect, and by 1989 its importance had been recognised by university libraries and by The British Library. At that time a considerable amount of early work concerned with applications, surveys, awareness and publicity was undertaken.
In 1992, UKOLN, the United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking, was fully established at the University of Bath, with half of its funding from The British Library Research and Development Department and half from JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee. It is now a major vehicle for dissemination of information on electronic libraries, supporting events such as the Follett Lectures, seminars conferences and publishing. In particular, UKOLN has demonstrated networking power by implementing and offering a wide range of Web services.
ARIADNE, the Internet magazine for librarians and information specialists, is the latest outcome of collaboration with eLib and in January of this year it attracted over one hundred thousand accesses.
The Conference on Long Term Preservation of Electronic Materials, held at Warwick University in November 1995, engendered various possible study areas, including:
Sectors outside the university environment - where research is a main raison d'être - have been less fortunate, with no Follett grants and consequently less awareness of information technology or networking matters, and on the level of research in general. The British Library Research and Development Department is therefore concentrating efforts on the Public Library and other relevant non-academic sectors.
After long neglect, Public Libraries have a window of opportunity which must not be missed. Initiatives such as EARL, Electronic Access to Resources in Libraries, and Millennium funding must be promoted. A strong movement is developing to "empower the people" through public access to information superhighways. Political statements, such as the following issued recently by the Labour Party are very encouraging:
"Access: We wish to ensure that participation in the information revolution is available to all and not just to the privileged few. There must be equality of access through an integrated national network which covers all parts of the country, reaching as extensively and as affordably as possible, in which each network system links with others. We seek to empower individual citizens as participants and consumers and also to ensure equal access to the providers of services."
Currently, rather than Public Libraries being the focus of Governmental networking efforts, priority is being given to wiring up schools and hospitals. Thus, to support the Secretary of State for National Heritage's statement concerning uptake of the Internet in Public Libraries, UKOLN commissioned a rapid review of this subject, using telephone survey techniques to contact all Public Libraries. The results, with a 100% response, revealed that:
The survey shows a low take-up and a need for investment; though leading-edge research (for example, CLIP, the Croydon Library Internet Project, IT-Point, the Solihull Library Access Project) and consortia such as EARL cannot transform Public Libraries. They can, however, point the way to larger scale endeavours, such as the Library Association's Millennium bid, and influence political strategies backed by hard cash - be it Government financing, Local Authority sources or public/private sector partnerships.
The British Library Research and Development has a new Director, taking his appointment at a time of immense change.
The Secretary of State has appointed a new Libraries and Information Commission to co-ordinate information issues between sectors, to review the United Kingdom's international role, especially in regard to the European Union, and, in particular, to develop research policy in Library Information Systems. The new Director will be involved with the Research Sub-Committee of that Commission.
Meanwhile, the cuts in funding are expected to continue and both The British Library and its Research and Development Department will not be exempt. Accordingly, The British Library is re-structuring and the Research arm will follow suit. There will inevitably be a re-focus of effort, with perhaps less directed at higher education, though liaison with that area will remain of paramount importance (universities are still the logical contacts for high technology). Interest will grow in private sector input into research, probably via partnerships and joint funding.
It should be emphasised in this context that it will be the hand of friendship that The British Library Research and Development Department will be extending and not the begging bowl. Research will continue at The British Library.
For further information, contact the speaker at terry.cannon@bl.uk
This account was drafted for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy. It is based on notes taken during the presentation and slides used.
As one of the world's great research libraries, the British Library has served scholarship, research and innovation for over four hundred and fifty years. Now, tremendous changes are taking place at a rapid, and increasing, rate. Some of these transformations arise from the demands of users who are themselves influenced by new phenomena, such as the Internet; some are due to the sweeping changes affecting equipment, particularly computers and communications. The British Library is preparing for this new environment, not only by initiating programmes to exploit information technology, but by forging new partnerships to meet the challenges ahead.
As well as being the national library of the United Kingdom, the British Library is one of the world's great research libraries. With an annual budget of £110 million, it employs a staff of 2,300 people and houses over one hundred and fifty million items.
Its main purpose is to serve scholarship, research and innovation. In this respect the Library is not primarily providing resources for undergraduate teaching, but acts rather as a research material provider. Its strategic objectives are exemplified in the following quotations from the Library's Strategic Objectives for the Year 2000 report:
Computer literacy is becoming more and more commonplace, from the schoolroom to the workplace (a library example of how much this aspect has changed is in the OPAC, the On-line Public Access Catalogue, which was originally feared to be too complex for the public user and is now considered to be too simple). This process has been encouraged by the exponentially increasing use of the Internet.
In its own services and collections, The British Library is sure that digital materials will not replace all traditional library materials and that people will continue to want to use them traditional materials. In parallel, there is an inexorable rise in the demand for digital materials.
There is also a definite trend for users to want desktop type of access, whenever they want and wherever they are.
Information Technology (IT) is polarising in respect to its equipment and activities. Convergence on a global scale is manifest in computers and communications, media and publishing (where many organisations are merging) and education and entertainment. The same technology trends are catalysing great individuality, creativity and variety.
Access to electronically held information is distance-independent and in the near future the cost of using powerful communications over long distances will be negligible. At present, one hour of such use would cost about five cents. Although this might be perceived as relatively low and although it will undoubtedly fall, the level of charge is currently two orders of magnitude above costs and significant changes are perhaps unlikely over the next five years. Nevertheless communications is now viewed as a global commodity, though the infrastructure is not in place as yet in many parts of the world.
Software tools are becoming increasingly inexpensive, easy-to-use, powerful and sophisticated. This, combined with the development, price reductions and availability of hardware advances, such as massively parallel processing, will allow desktop computers to interact very quickly and a great deal more naturalistically.
The British Library is preparing for the new environment, where access will be a primary factor. It has initiated the Initiatives for Access programme of pilots and demonstrators to exploit IT, test new services, examine organisational implications and provide a vehicle for collaboration and Public Relations - including PR on exactly what a great Research and Development library is capable of.
The change of technology has been viewed by some as a change of purpose, but this is not so. That remains the same as it has been for the last four hundred and fifty years.
The vision of the British Library is of integrated access to its digital collections and those of other organisations. It will, therefore, be organised, and indexed, for such access and will work towards increasing the access, both in terms of people and materials, while maintaining availability of digital archives.
Other aspects of that vision will include staff having "digital competencies" (all staff will have need of these, not just a few "digital librarians"), establishing a balance between the requirements of Intellectual Property Rights and fair dealing with information and the commitment of substantial investment, from both the Library and its partners, be they government or private sector.
The priorities will be:
Collaboration has always been part of library provision and this has been encouraged by lack of resources, especially on a national level. The global digital library clearly requires co-operation, not least on standards, protocols and on services based on access to digital collections. Different kinds of partnerships will encompass agreements on standards, collaboration with other digital collection owners and joint ventures with the private sector. Different partners could be derived from the academic community, from industry and commerce and from public libraries. Partnership will provide opportunities for developing improved, more comprehensive services and a means of sharing development costs. In addition to nationally-based partnerships, the British Library will be seeking to extend collaboration with relevant organisations in both the European Union and the United States
It will also seek to utilise the United Kingdom government's Private Finance Initiative, acknowledging its key points (transfer of risk to the private sector, value for money for the taxpayer and open competition in the selection of partners) in respect to its three main models (financing public investment, private initiative and joint venture).
Overall, the great changes now taking place world-wide and at an accelerating rate will transform the nature of all libraries and the British Library will not be exempt from that process - far from it. That is the challenge over the next few years, a challenge for which the British Library is preparing and which it is looking forward to meeting.
Information is available from john.mahoney@bl.uk and at URL: http://portico.bl.uk/access/
This account was drafted for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy. It is based on notes taken during the presentation and slides used.
The costs of scholarly information are based on long experience with a print-based creation and distribution system. The global Internet, however, is already changing the economics of the information distribution system. Understanding networked information and its potential effect on universities' costs for acquiring, storing and delivering information is essential in today's information and technology-oriented world. New approaches to allocating institutional funds to recognise networked information are required if scholars and students are to benefit from new information technologies. Examining the functions of the scholarly information distribution process will indicate where changes in role and investment are required by universities if networked information is to be used successfully.
We can describe the knowledge infrastructure in terms of collection(s) of materials, methods of access, means of storage, channels of distribution and technologies for printing and display. In functional terms, it can be considered as equivalent to a traditional library. By contrast however, the Knowledge Infrastructure is radically different from conventional libraries in procedural and conceptual terms. In effect, we have the two completely different models of information management co-existing in parallel.
For any meaningful analysis on the Knowledge Infrastructure, we shall have to assume the existence of the Internet (or something like it). We will also find that the Knowledge Infrastructure demands close collaboration between traditionally separate constituencies such as campus organisations, technology groups and librarians.
The US has seen a major transition in management of the network over the last 18 months or so. The change has involved the emergence of the Internet as an entity in its own right. The models for its overall management and technical approach are being changed as it moves away from Federal Government control (under the NSF) towards a private market approach. Some academics feel some sense of loss as this privatisation proceeds; but the full financial and technological impacts of this evolutionary change - and of the rapid growth which triggered it - are still far from complete.
Today, the Knowledge Infrastructure is a priority for the current administration and Congress. The national technological infrastructure effectively extends down to the workstation level, but policy fails to recognise the demands of integrated functionality. The level of regulation is being debated; some want a competitive environment, though a regulated environment has real advantages. The Telecommunications Reform Act - a major piece of legislation - is an attempt to reconcile some of these conflicting demands; but competition will be central to the policy.
The current network operates on data packets, and is moving towards a market-managed technological environment. There are regulated local voice network services and also regulated local video distribution services. The trend is towards integration of these in the near future.
This change and debate inescapably raises the question of what the higher education community's interest should be in the evolving national networking infrastructure.
Any model of scholarly communications must extend from the creation of information to its use, and must take in all steps in between. This can be done by expressing a model in terms of functions and performance attributes.
The functions can be summarised in the following list:
Note that a digital Knowledge Infrastructure has to provide equivalents to all of these functions if it is to be successful. Along with these key functions, we have to consider the following performance attributes:
Analysis with this model suggests that new roles and changed institutional behaviour will be required. It is also clear that there is a desperate need for investment in the technological infrastructure.
The success and survival of the Knowledge Infrastructure must be examined in the light of this model. We can, for example, analyse electronic journals, comparing haw they perform along the entire chain from creator to user, compared to the conventional paper scheme. One of our challenges is to make sure that all functions are performed well.
The marketplace for scholarly information is evolving rapidly.
The concept of intellectual property rights (IPR) is central; and the issues it raises are controversial. Fundamentally, we can identify three kinds of information:
Note that the paper model combines these three kinds of information successfully. There are two ways in which information is used, namely:
Fierce debate rages around what usage should be compensated and what should be uncompensated. The mechanisms for dealing with IPR for electronic materials are not yet fully developed, and where international transactions are concerned the level of development is even lower. The concept of "fair use" is creating a controversial dynamic; if anything, there is a trend towards a more conservative, more restrictive interpretation of fair use.
While issues and mechanisms are immature, we can be confident of one thing: there is no free ride in this electronic environment; we will get what we pay for!
Librarians have long been great sharers of information. Possibly because of this, perceptions about resource sharing are based on concepts allied to the paper model, and these perceptions are changing but slowly. Accordingly there is a tendency towards the premise that any savings will result from an extension of the inter-library loan model; and equally a tendency to view the acquisitions budget as likely to show savings. In fact however, due to the continued strength of private property rights in scholarly literature, libraries acquisitions budgets are likely to increase rather decrease.
To use the language of classical economics, the marketplace for journals is imperfect. The imperfection is due to the fact that there are no substitutable goods for many journals, as evidenced by the fact that librarians tend to reduce the numbers of subscriptions rather than subscribing to alternative titles when faced with price rises which exceed budget increases. The last few years have seen increases of !0% - 15% every year in the cost of journals. We can guess that increases cannot continue indefinitely; something is bound to change.
Electronic media allow for a diverse range of pricing methods and policies. The question of how we will pay for information is now considerably more significant than it was with paper publications. The pricing schemes include:
There may be other variables too; for instance, costs for the same information may vary according to how new or old the information is when it is used.
It is important for us to recognise that the different approaches can lead to considerably different total costs. We can have some influence on costs, at least in some cases, by co-operating with other users to reap economies of scale. And it is clear that the general trend is towards licensing rather than acquisition. However, other issues are less clear cut: for example, if a licence payment is arranged, what happens when the licence expires? What happens if users are by that time "hooked" on using the information? Libraries should beware of low initial costs for licences.
Electronic information requires less storage space than information on paper (though realistically, at best we can only hope that it will reduce the rate of growth of library storage space). Furthermore, the cost of storing information electronically is less than the cost of storing the equivalent on paper (at least in the short term). So electronic materials can lead to savings in costs for storage, access and circulation of scientific and technical materials. We should look to these cost centres to provide additional funds for content acquisition.
In the US, the concept of needing to pay for archiving and preservation is still relatively young (because the history of the US is relatively so short). But archiving and preservation must be recognised as being of paramount importance, and funded accordingly.
Two conceptual changes will be enabled by emerging electronic technologies:
Most so-called "electronic" strategies today rely on the use of paper at some level. A good example is the SPIRES High Energy Physics pre-prints initiative, which is operating successfully on a large scale. Although it allows the production, circulation and storage of papers in electronic form, the authors still demand that the papers be published in paper form. The real savings of these technologies will only start to be realised when there is no paper stage.
All of these factors will lead us to revise our thinking about the relative importance and sizes of traditional library cost centres. Making investment decisions for electronic information rights in a networked world are complex.
Content costs will almost inevitably increase, and there is little that librarians alone can do about it. We therefore will need to find ways to accommodate the increased costs of information content. Possibilities may include:
Finally, the cost structures may affect collection policies, as there will be pressures to let these policies be dictated by usage more than before.
The above has outlined several of the issues and scenarios which will shape the future. Just when a new electronic models will rule is not known; certainly we do not expect any single model to dominate the scene for the next twenty years. Over that period the differing models will exist in parallel. This will lead to "unnecessary:" duplication of some activities - and hence higher costs. Consequently we will need funds processes to support all the models at once, and recognition of this increasingly expensive and complex environment is an essential element of any new strategy.
To close, there are some actions we can take to advance the situation positively. The actions are:
This account was drafted for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy. It is based on notes taken during the presentation, slides used, and text adapted from a WWW presentation on CLIC which is referred to at the end of this account.
Molecular science is both a very visual and "three dimensional" subject, and one that is very rich in precise semantic content and standard definitions. The CLIC electronic journal project has as its objectives the parallel printed and electronic publication of a flagship chemistry journal, that will use some very recent publishing technologies to deliver to the reader the three dimensional visual element along with textual information.
Chemistry is one of the most visual and "three dimensional" of sciences. For many generations, communication of the subject has been rooted on the printed pages of chemical journals, with even colour a rare event. Partially because of such limitations, the subject has evolved a complex and arcane symbolism for its written representation. The complexities of this "chemical nomenclature" in turn result in substantial risk of the propagation of errors and misinterpretation of results. A refereeing system exists to catch both errors of science and transcription errors, but the reality is that referees have few "tools" to assist them to catch errors on the printed page other than then own eyes and minds.
For the first time, electronic tools to allow the cost-effective dissemination of three-dimensional information are now at hand. We can envisage distributing electronic documents which represent three-dimensional objects (molecules), and which allow readers to "manipulate" them to examine the objects from all angles. Electronic publications also allow other features, such as linking and access statistics. This combination of features has created the opportunity which the CLIC project is exploring.
The main objective of this eLib project is to develop parallel electronic and printed forms of the established journal Chemical Communications. An electronic version will provide such information to the reader, with what might be called "semantic integrity" and accuracy of the information. We even envisage providing mechanisms for readers to comment on the individual articles, and thus to interact with the original authors. To this extent, this aim differs from some other electronic journals, where the paramount objective is to achieve what is called "page integrity" with the original printed version. Whilst semantic and page integrity are not necessarily exclusive, to achieve both requires significant extra effort in storing the basic content of the journal, and its presentation to the user. Thus the CLIC project will concentrate on developing standards for storing, transmitting, displaying and applying molecular information.
This is being achieved in three stages:
From March 1997, a number of complete issues of the journal will be available electronically, with some enhancement.
Not the least task is educating the audience to actively participate in this method of information retrieval, and indeed persuading authors to contribute information in the appropriate form in the first place. The CLIC project thus aims to increase awareness in the chemical community of the possibilities and advantages of electronic publications. This is being achieved by:
The project team is particularly pleased to note that a number of chemistry software vendors are now producing freely distributable software for use with the CLIC journal. In general, this is in the form of "cut-down" versions of commercial products, made available for network use by the vendors. One product specifically designed for such an e-journal has recently been announced (Chemscape Chime from MDLI). Another notable success is the popularity of the e-conference: over 15,000 different people have connected to the conference in the last ten months (note that this is comparable to the number of attendees at a major ACS conference, but at a fraction of the cost!)
For more information on these activities, refer to the URL at the end of this account.
The project also has objectives which are specific to the nature of the discipline of chemistry.
Primarily, it seeks to achieve "future-proof" electronic delivery mechanisms. This is problematic, as many necessary standards simply do not exist yet. One approach being investigated is the use of SGML to HTML conversion with chemical DTDs. Another hopeful prospect is the results of the Hyper-G project, namely its distributed servers and index engines. We are also monitoring the progress of the PURL (Persistent URL) initiative.
Another domain-specific requirement is the preservation of chemical semantics. The team is pursuing a number of alternatives including chemical MIME (for the multimedia delivery of molecular content), virtual reality techniques (using VRML), Java and CML (Chemical Markup Language).
The CLIC consortium comprises groups in three university chemistry departments (Imperial College, Leeds and Cambridge Universities) and a learned society (The Royal Society of Chemistry).
At present, the team approaches authors to request electronic copies of their papers; they then convert them and apply the electronic enhancements. The process of preparing and publishing electronic papers is faster than paper publishing, but at the moment both electronic and paper issues are published at about the same time.
One part of the publication process which is easier and faster is refereeing. In one case, a paper was submitted and refereed electronically within eight hours! We are considering "commentable" or "discussable" papers too, but this raises questions about the nature of moderation; the best answers are not yet clear.
The electronic medium is ideally suited to the gathering of access statistics; this can act as a valuable form of peer reviewing.
This presentation, plus more background information including demonstration of some of the special
features such as viewing three dimensional molecules, is available at URL:
http://www/ch/ic/ac/uk/clic/talk_1.html
Project contacts are: Leeds University: Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine: Cambridge University: CML:
This account was drafted for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy.
It is based on notes taken during the presentation and slides used.
Archaeology is a particularly appropriate subject to promote the use of electronic media. Much archaeological
work is by its nature destructive; archaeologists therefore need to preserve access to primary data in order to
repeat and test conclusions. Traditional publishing methods have not provided the functionality that archaeologists
require to manipulate the data types involved. The Internet Archaeology project aims to establish both a new
definitive electronic publication and a model for subsequent developments. Key issues are touched on, with
proposed approaches.
It is clear that electronic publications can be more flexible and more effective than paper publications
could ever be. One brief example illustrates this: during the 1920s, an archaeologist painstakingly
reconstructed the design of a theatre which had been excavated. His reconstruction was widely accepted
until it was re-examined during this decade using solid modelling tools. Because of the facilities offered by
solid modelling, this re-examination proved that the earlier work was not completely feasible, and ideas about
the form of the theatre were revised. This probably would not have happened without the use of powerful
computer-assisted techniques.
Accordingly, the main objective of this project is to develop a fully electronic, regular, online only,
refereed journal. Internet Archaeology aims to become one of the world's archaeological journals of record,
by publishing refereed papers of high academic standing which also use the potential of electronic publication
to the full.
Subsidiary objectives are to:
The project consortium is led by the University of York. The other members are:
The project is constituted as a charitable trust, with a formal management structure including a steering committee,
an editorial board and a technical panel. The chair of the committee and Honorary Editor is Professor Barry Cunliffe,
from Oxford.
Archaeology is well suited to the application of advanced electronic techniques. It is multidisciplinary subject, which makes calls on many different skills and methods of analysis. One instance of this is its use of many different data types - text, images, numerical data, GIS modelling etc. Practitioners already make use of electronic tools, and a body of experience in multimedia publication is growing.
WHY AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL?
An electronic journal will be an ideal vehicle to convey archaeological information. It will provide new tools to
allow archaeologists to say things about the past in ways which where not previously possible. It will allow access
to primary research data, enriching it with additional functionality so that readers can manipulate this data,
allowing readers to make use of, and do justice to, the rich diversity of information.
Finally, an electronic journal has some special logistical benefits which make it well suited to the dissemination
of academic works. Its network orientation makes distribution both easy and inexpensive; and the distribution can
include unusual or bespoke programs which add value to the data.
Unfortunately, some drawbacks accompany these benefits. In particular, the costs of preparing papers have been
higher than anticipated, partly because of the many different data types with which archaeologists work. The team
has also found that the complexities and difficulties of running an electronic journal are greater than expected,
but remains convinced that it offers a valuable method of publication for archaeological work.
The journal will feature:
The annual running cost of Internet Archaeology is projected to be about £60,000. Clearly, an equivalent
revenue stream is needed. This may arise from diverse sources including subscriptions and access charges.
Various models are being considered; they include personal subscriptions, multiple access subscriptions and
so on. One option will be to offer personal subscriptions which allow greater functionality than site licences.
The final model is not certain; but it has been agreed that the first issue will be free for a period of one year.
We also intend that keyword searching and contents information will remain free of charge.
As in any publication, protection of intellectual property is a concern. In this domain, there is the added
complication that some of the data is commercially valuable (eg to companies which offer services connected
with environmental archaeological impact assessments).
Refereeing is essential for quality control and academic credibility. It has proved difficult because not
all archaeologists are sufficiently familiar with the relevant multimedia formats. A two-stage refereeing process
is being developed. The stages are:
In practice, this turns out to take place over the network as an iterative process.
Careful construction of the reader licences is essential so that the right balance is struck between
usability and fair use on one hand and excessive sharing on the other. Rules for citations are envisaged.
Somehow, the long term survival of the journal contents must be assured. How this will happen is as
yet unclear. Evidently, standards will have a part to play here; and the Arts and Humanities Data
Service may also be involved. This is a complex issue which is not yet resolved.
More information about the project and a sample electronic paper which displays many of the unique
features of the electronic medium are available at URL:
http://intarch.york.ac.uk
Members of the project team include:
Dr Michael Heyworth, Council for British Archaeology
m.heyworth@bbcnc.org.uk The editor of Internet Archaeology is Dr Alan Vince, University of York
editor@intarch.york.ac.uk
This account was prepared for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy.
It is based on an edited version of a paper supplied by the speaker.
The members of the CIC (Committee on Institutional Co-operation) are presently engaged in the collaborative
development of the largest fully managed collection of electronic journals available on the Internet. The project
directly addresses the growing need to develop, test, and implement networked information tools and resources
which use collaborative, multi-institutional, efforts. This paper outlines the development of this resource,
and concludes with a discussion about the future environment which will be necessary if projects such as this
are to become commonplace throughout the higher education community. To place the project in context,
descriptions of the Committee on Institutional Co-operation (CIC), the CIC universities, the CIC Center for
Library Initiatives, and CICNet, Inc., are given.
As noted above, the "CIC" stands for the Committee on Institutional Co-operation, a 35 year-old collaboration
among the following universities:
Today, there are over 75 separate and unique co-operative activities operating under the aegis of the CIC.
Collectively the CIC universities account for more than 17% of the doctorates awarded annually, more than
$2.5 billion in externally funded research annually, and over 17% of the holdings of the Association for Research
Libraries. They represent an aggregate total of over 500,000 students, 33,000 faculty, and 57 million volumes
within their libraries.
Like all of the nation's major institutions of higher education, the CIC universities depend on the availability
of reliable, high quality resources of all kinds, ranging from those available through their libraries and
faculties to the most advanced technologies in their laboratories, computing environments, and related teaching
and research facilities. What is unique about the CIC universities, however, are the many initiatives within
and among them which depend on a reliable and advanced networked infrastructure and on staff, facility, and
financial investments focused on true programmatic Co-operation. Collaborative initiatives have evolved which
require stable inter-institutional technical standards and support mechanisms and, increasingly, the availability
of shared, reliable information resources and services. Indeed, there are now some initiatives which might not be
possible without such infrastructures.
The Committee on Institutional Cooperation is made up of the Provosts of the above universities; it meets
four times annually. The office of the CIC is located at Champaign/Urbana, Illinois. It is professionally
staffed, with a director and nine FTEs. Its current operating budget is slightly over $4 million. It is
important to understand that there is core financial backing to the philosophical concept of the CIC in order
to understand the context of this paper. Additional funding, from member dues, research grants, and the usual
host of other sources exist for most of the initiatives which have evolved under the umbrella of the office
of the CIC.
The CIC has always been governed by its three founding principles:
These principles are critical to the successes of our programs. Among academic consortia, the
nature of the CIC institutions' collaboration is outstanding: individually these are some of the
greatest institutions of higher learning in this - or any - country. They are driven by different missions,
governed by separate boards and obtain their funding from a variety of separate sources. They are all
clearly autonomous organisations with no central funding or administrative body. Further, each of these
universities has unparalleled academic and research programs in a variety of fields; they sometimes compete
fiercely for funding, students and stature. Yet, co-operatively, they have been able to become a formidable
force in higher education.
Two offices which have evolved under the umbrella of the CIC are the CIC Center for Library Initiatives
and CICNet, Incorporated.
CICNet, the regional TCP/IP network founded by the CIC in 1988, serves the internetworking needs of the
CIC universities, other academic institutions, not-for-profit organisations, and businesses. CICNet has had a
strong interest in the design and deployment of networked information services. CICNet is currently involved
in three major National Science Foundation-funded projects to bring Internet access to under-served communities,
namely:
These projects will enable constituencies that can most benefit from Internet access for communication to
take advantage of it. Funding for CICNet is primarily from three sources: member dues from the CIC universities,
specific projects funded by the National Science Foundation, and the sale of Internet connectivity and services to
for-profit and non-for-profit sectors.
The CIC Center for Library Initiatives (CLI) was established in September 1994, to support collaborative
efforts specifically among the CIC libraries. Co-operative resource sharing has long been a practice among
the CIC libraries, and the CIC has an enviable record of successful, funded R&D projects. Most notably, the
CIC libraries are now engaged in a Virtual Electronic Library (VEL) project, funded through a United States
Department of Education grant. The VEL project will develop the technical infrastructure required to provide
seamless interconnections among a range of OPAC systems within the CIC libraries, and demonstrate its
applications through user-initiated interlibrary loans and document delivery throughout the CIC. The VEL
will enable more than half a million faculty, staff, and students to explore and take advantage of vast
resources within the CIC. Inherent to the VEL project is the addition of an expanded set of electronic
sources to the VEL pool of information resources. The Center for Library Initiatives is funded by dues
paid by members of the CIC.
Thus the general framework for collaboration lies in the strong support at the highest levels of member
university administration as evidenced by the existence of the funded office of the Committee on Institutional
Cooperation and its subsidiaries. Relevant initiatives in support of the missions of the member universities
flow from within this framework. One such initiative, in this case involving the Center for Library Initiatives
and CICNet, Inc., is the Wide Area Information Resources Management (SEIRM) project, informally referred to as
the CIC Electronic Journals Collection or CIC EJC.
Increasingly ubiquitous Internet access within the research university, combined with the popularisation of the
World Wide Web, has made on-line academic publication and research more desirable. The expansion of Internet-based
publishing provides opportunities and challenges for libraries interested in the shared development and management
of electronic collections. The low cost per increment of user access compared with print journals, regardless
of user location, argues strongly for building multi-institutional electronic collections. Internet tools and
communications methods also make it possible to distribute the collection development and management tasks across
multiple institutions. We are faced with two challenges:
The development of the CIC Electronic Journals Collection (CIC EJC) grows out of collaborative efforts between
CICNet and the CIC library community, combined with CICNet's early work with WAIS and Gopher. In 1991, the CIC
library collection development officers asked CICNet to create an archive of the public domain electronic
journals which many of them had begun to collect locally but had no long-term means of archiving. CICNet went
beyond this original charge: archiving e-journals available at CIC member institutions, and sweeping the Internet
to collect all e-journals that could be obtained through an automated FTP process. The result, an undifferentiated
collection of some 700 titles in varying depths of retrospective coverage and completeness, was made accessible on a
CICNet server, and is now accessed approximately 35,000 times a day by users of the Internet.
The collection process was valuable in illustrating the range of materials available, but it became clear that
no entirely automated process could produce a collection that would satisfy the needs of most scholars. The
process of automatically sweeping the net could be used only to gather those items available through FTP. Many
new electronic journals are made available via Gopher or the Web. The current collection is best thought of as
a snapshot of materials available at a particular time in the history of the Internet rather than a comprehensive
resource, but the frequency of its use clearly indicates the need for a reliable managed collection of e-journals.
This collection is available at URL
gopher://gopher.cic.net:2000/11/e-serials/managed
In response to the need for a comprehensive collection of scholarly and research electronic journals,
the CIC Task Force on the Electronic Collection developed a complete plan for building a managed electronic
journal collection (CIC-EJC) based on the CICNet gopher server. The Task Force, which includes representation
both from CICNet and the CIC libraries, planned the collection from selection to maintenance. CICNet staff
then developed a prototype system based on the recommendations and input of the Task Force. The prototype
system is available on the World Wide Web at URL http://ejournals.cic.net and is intended to serve as an
illustration of the work which can be achieved by the librarians of the CIC universities and the staff of
CICNet. It includes some 50 electronic journals, with current bibliographic records, complete and current
holdings of all titles in the collection, a helpful World Wide Web interface which links the bibliographic
records to the e-journals (the journals remain on publishers' sites; the text is archived by CIC-EJC), and
consistent archiving of the materials in the collection. The prototype supports browsing by title and by
subject, and searching the bibliographic records. The titles are mainly in the areas of IT and science
subjects, but we hope to increase the Arts and Humanities coverage.
We have five broad objectives for this project:
The work of the project has been divided and organised as follows:
We hope to begin aggressive development of this resource within the next six months including:
Along the way, we hope to obtain insights into the answers for relatively fundamental questions, such as:
We will also consider natural functional enhancements, such as full text searching.
As we move forward with development of a viable virtual electronic library, the CIC EJC will serve both as
a testbed of inter-university collaboration and as an integral information resource for our users. The CIC
Center for Library Initiatives, in concert with CICNet, will continue the work of tying together discrete
projects and developments with an aim of providing flexible, desktop access and delivery of information
resources for the 500,000 students and 35,000 faculty and researchers of the CIC universities.
In the short term, we have submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation for support of the
CIC EJC. We will continue to refine specifications for interlibrary lending systems and concomitant
delivery mechanisms, and we will move aggressively into the production and dissemination of digital
resources. Our aim is to deploy a seamless access tool to allow users to navigate the wealth of CIC
library and information resources. Through such action, we will continue the tradition of excellence
in higher education upon which the CIC was founded - providing our students with the finest education
available, and providing our researchers with unparalleled access to information. And by providing the
CIC EJC to the Internet community we continue our great tradition of serving a vital role as contributors
of research results and products to the broader international education community.
Further information is available at URL:
http://www.cic.net/cic/cic.html/
The speaker can be contacted at bmallen@uiuc.edu
The prototype electronic journal collection (CIC-EJC) is available at URL:
http://ejournals.cic.net
At the request of the speaker, this presentation has not been reported here in full.
Interested readers are referred to the URLs shown at the end of the paper.
This presentation described the innovative instructional projects that combine networked information
technology and resources, interdisciplinary teams for design and delivery of instruction and interests in
student collaborative learning. The descriptions were based on data from the ten project teams who
participated in the Coalition for Networked Information's second invitational Conference on New Learning
Communities, held at Indianapolis in November 1995.
The first New Learning Communities conference was held in July 1994 in Phoenix and was furthered in a
subsequent conference in November 17-19 1995 at Indianapolis. Both were organised under the auspices of the
Coalition for Networked Information, CNI. The programme seeks to promote cross-fertilisation of the different
types of professionals in higher education who use networks to enrich their curricula and broaden students'
learning experiences.
To achieve this aim, the programme brings together institutional, or inter-institutional, teams of
varying compositions and roles, comprising faculty, librarians, information technologists, instructional
technologists and students. The exchange of ideas and exposure to different viewpoints will lead to a greater
understanding of the total perspective in terms of campus utilisation of networks and the development of a set
of "best practices" for the benefit of the wider educational community.
From the propositions put forward in response to a call for projects issued by CNI early in 1995,
ten teams were selected to participate in the Indianapolis conference. The projects are:
Further information can be obtained from the following URLs:
This account was drafted for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy.
It is based on notes taken during the presentation and slides used.
Over 30 UK universities have joined together to produce and evaluate language learning courseware
in five European languages. The project is nearing completion, with over 40 packages coming on stream
in 1996. Issues such as consortium management, pedagogic design, formative evaluation procedures,
training and dissemination all suggest lessons to be learned.
The focus of the Technology Enhanced Language Learning project (TELL) was the production of
courseware for language learning. The project was initiated in 1992, and was funded by the
Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP).
The objective was to produce courseware for French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
All levels of learner were to be catered for, from beginner to final-year expert. The courseware
was developed to run on current desktop systems; as the project started in 1993, the basic
requirement is a PC with a 80386 processor or an equivalent Macintosh.
The project started in January 1993 and was formally completed in December 1995, with a total budget
of £1.35 million. Being funded ultimately by top-slicing from the funding councils, it was undertaken
in order to determine the value of computer-aided learning, and the place it should have, in this field.
The products to be delivered by the project were divided into three strands, namely:
For example, there is a translation environment, which provides help and hints etc; and sets of
grammar exercises to get students to apply their new knowledge.
In the end, the project has produced 43 packages. These include seven CD-ROMs and 36 networkable packages.
They are at present being commercialised, but are available to higher education institutions at cost.
TELL was performed by a consortium led from the University of Hull, which is also the location of the
Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) Centre for Modern Languages. The project has thus benefited from
CTI expertise in requirements, its knowledge of appropriate developers, and experience in project management.
There were 15 development sites and 21 affiliate (evaluation) sites.
Project management was performed by the speaker (about 25% of time), a project manager (50%), and one
other (100%), with secretarial support. It turned out that project management was difficult and demanding,
for several reasons. The obvious reason is that tight production deadlines and academia do not necessarily
sit well together. Less obvious perhaps is the complexity of managing and distributing funds to so many other
institutions through the University of Hull. Finally, liaison with the funding councils was problematic in the
early days of the project, specifically in the area of co-ordination between projects (for example over the issue
of copyright).
Some of the motivators, or "adhesives", which helped the consortium work together effectively included payment
deadlines, and the requirement to complete tasks in order to get paid; reputation, which impelled contributors to
produce good quality work; and a degree of camaraderie with co-workers engaged in similar tasks.
Co-ordination of work and standardisation of approaches was of course important with a consortium as
large as TELL. Within about six months of the start of work, we had agreed common guidelines (down to the
level of fonts and colours). As an evaluation of the value of tools of this type is an important part of the
project, we also agreed common evaluation procedures, including a particularly extensive exercise to monitor
students using software packages.
We undertook and planned widespread dissemination activities, using common materials. This included
workshops, site visits, and prospective user group meetings.
The project materials are now being promoted (copies of promotional literature are available on request),
and the materials themselves will be available from April 1996 onwards. Some funding has been obtained for
ongoing maintenance and development.
We are optimistic of success, but obviously it remains to be proven. Signs of success will be a sense
of ownership of the products by the HE community; development of a "materials bank" consisting of additional
compatible resources, and development of new packages. The amount of success will become apparent in a
timescale of some two or three years.
On another level, we already know we can claim some successes. We successfully steered a consortium of
over 30 universities to work together and to produce results. Teams have been formed, some of which are
continuing to work together. Many skills have been acquired and enhanced during the course of the project.
And we have created a seed bed into which the nuclei of new ideas can fruitfully be planted.
Further information is available by e-mail from
g.chesters@french.hull.ac.uk
This account was prepared for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy. It is based on edited and merged versions of papers and slides supplied by the speakers.
IT POINT is about bringing the benefits of IT to the community, and to create a vision of the public branch
library of the 21st century. The project involved the installation of PCs with a wide range of facilities for
public use into a branch library. This paper describes the aims of the project, the implications for the public
library service, and community involvement and awareness. Statistical details of usage are provided, and the paper
concludes with a glimpse into the future for IT POINT and information networking in public libraries.
IT POINT is within Chelmsley Wood Library, a large branch library situated in the North of Solihull, to the
East of Birmingham. It is the second largest library in the borough, serving a community of about 24,000 with a
collection of some 60,000 items.
IT POINT is a part of the public library. It contains facilities for members of the public to book and pay
for the use of one of six PCs to access a range of facilities. The facilities include:
Customers can use training packages to learn how to use software packages at their own pace.
IT POINT is not only a fully functioning service but also a research project funded by The British Library
Research and Development Department. The research nature is illustrated by the fact that the service was originally
free when opened in August 1994. Charges were introduced in October 1995, to test ways of sustaining the project,
and are likely to stay. The project has been an opportunity to provide public library managers with a well-tested
model which can be adapted to their own services. Its present funding from the BL R&DD ends in March 1996; the
future of the service and how it can be sustained are examined below.
The project has created an opportunity to redress the imbalance of IT development in the library community where
academic libraries have benefited from the development of JANET and special libraries can often call upon the finances
of a large parent organisation.
The aims are to:
Early findings are described below; the final report is planned to be available in May 1996.
These IT services are managed not by library staff but by an IT expert (Gulshan Kayam). The library's role has
been to support the project and ensure it complements the library service offered to the community. The advantages
of having such a facility within a branch library have been enormous. Access to the Internet and CD-ROMs is an
excellent boost to any library service.
Staff training and awareness have been fundamental to the acceptance and utilisation of these new formats. But
there remain a number of challenges to using IT for information provision:
Statistics for the use of IT POINT by staff for public enquiries have not been collected, but on average there
are some two or three such per week. The volume probably would increase if there were greater integration into the
library service, for example if there were CD-ROM and Internet access at the Information Desk. This will come with
a change in culture and with younger, more IT-literate, staff.
In addition to using IT for public enquiries, we have also used more direct methods to introduce our customers to
the advantages of IT.
The greatest success has been in schools. Not all local schools have PCs and CD-ROMs, so IT POINT has provided a
real advantage. We have organised an annual contest between primary schools, called the CD-ROM challenge. In this
competition, groups of students race against each other to answer questions using CD-ROM encyclopaedias. We have
also organised a Print vs IT challenge to encourage recognition between the different formats of information.
We use CD-ROMs with younger customers as well, in story time sessions for under-fives. This encourages parents
to recognise that they may have a need to understand IT in order to support their children's education needs.
Using the library's links with the careers service has also ensured the high profile of IT POINT, as it becomes a
showcase once a year when the library hosts the annual Careers Convention for the locality. Therefore, young adults
and their parents have an opportunity to view and use the facilities.
Informal coffee mornings and introductory tours have been an opportunity to encourage our customers to recognise
the advantages of IT and the role it has to play within the library.
All these activities have been ways of changing people's perceptions of libraries by ensuring the use of IT is
customary within libraries.
IT POINT currently has 1,100 members. 50% of members are local, from Chelmsley Wood. A further 24% of members
come from nearby neighbouring areas in North Solihull, 5% come from South Solihull and the rest come from neighbouring
cities such as Birmingham and Coventry. See chart 1 below.
IT POINT's membership ranges from 5 years of age to 75. Chart 2 shows the division of men, women, boys and
girls using the services.
Usage increases noticeably during the Summer months, when school children are on holiday, and make greater use
of the service. For example, in August 1995 Internet usage reached 279 hours. Chart 3 shows the change in usage
by month, for selected applications over a four month period in Summer 1995.
Usage of the service dropped in October 1995, which is when usage charging was introduced. The decrease can be
seen by comparing chart 3 with chart 4, which shows usage for the following four months. Usage is now steadily
progressing, and with further marketing of IT POINT's services we anticipate that usage will increase anew. Internet
usage here includes Electronic mail, Web browsers, Telnet, Gopher and FTP.
The usage is shown above in strictly statistical terms. What impact IT POINT has had on the community, we do not
know yet. This is the subject of research work in progress; it is being carried out by researchers from the University
of Central England. However, we already see a wide diversity of kinds of usage:
We also see fascinated individuals who are totally taken by what the Internet has to offer and over the past 7
months we have been providing Internet awareness sessions to the community.
People attending training sessions are not necessarily members of IT POINT. Some are from the private sector.
As well as aiming to raise the awareness within the community , IT POINT has been used to train internal staff to use
the Internet and CD-ROMs. And not staff just from Libraries but also from the IT Department, Arts & Tourism, Careers
and Housing Departments. We also have close relationships with the local Job Centre and the Citizens' Advice Bureau.
We have provided awareness sessions for their staff, enabling them to refer clients with confidence having seen what
we have to offer.
We see three main themes emerging:
Cambridge Site of the Royal Society of Chemistry:
David James (Project Manager) jamesd@rsc.org
Ben Whitaker benw@chem.leeds.ac.uk
and Chris Hildyard chrish@chem.leeds.ac.uk
Henry Rzepa (Project Director) rzepa@ic.ac.uk
and Omer Casher hoc@ic.ac.uk
Jonathan Goodman jmg11@cus.cam.ac.uk
and Dave Riddick dar25@cus.cam.ac.uk
Peter Murray-Rust p.murray-rust@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk
INTERNET ARCHAEOLOGY: OVERCOMING THE OBSTACLES AND USING THE OPPORTUNITIES
SEAMUS ROSS, Assistant Secretary (Information Technology), The British Academy
ABSTRACT
THE PROJECT
Objectives
The Consortium
WHY ARCHAEOLOGY?
CONTENTS
ISSUES
Revenue Generation
Intellectual Property
Refereeing
Licensing
Long Term Preservation
FURTHER INFORMATION
Dr Seamus Ross, The British Academy seamusr@britac.ac.uk
Dr Julian Richards, University of York jdr1@york.ac.uk
FROM EPHERMERAL TO INTEGRAL: COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALS
BARBARA McFADDEN ALLEN Director, CIC Center for Library Initiatives
ABSTRACT
THE CIC UNIVERSITIES
THE COMMITTEE ON INSTITUTIONAL COOPERATION
CIC OFFICES: CO-ORDINATION AND LEADERSHIP
THE PROBLEM: UNMANAGED SCHOLARLY MATERIALS
PREDECESSOR TO THE PROTOTYPE: THE CICNET E-SERIALS ARCHIVE
A PROTOTYPE COLLECTION: THE CIC-EJC
Center for Library Initiatives:
CICNet, Incorporated:
CIC Member Librarians:
DEVELOPMENT PLANS
FURTHER INFORMATION
NEW LEARNING COMMUNITIES IN THE NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT
JANA BRADLEY, Assistant Professor, Indiana University - Purdue University of Indiana
ABSTRACT
NEW LEARNING COMMUNITIES
THE PROJECTS
http://www.cni.org/projects/nlc/www/nlc.html
ftp://ftp.cni.org/CNI/projects/nlc
gopher://gopher.cni.org.70/11/cniftp/projects/nlc
LANGUAGE LEARNING:
A CONSORTIUM APPROACH
GRAHAM CHESTERS, TELL Consortium, University of Hull
ABSTRACT
THE TELL PROJECT
PROJECT DELIVERABLES
PROJECT ORGANISATION
COMMON ACTIVITIES
SUCCESSES
FURTHER INFORMATION
IT POINT - NETWORKING IN THE COMMUNITY
GULSHAN KAYAM, IT POINT Manager & SUE TURNER, Library Manager, Chelmsley Wood Library
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
IT POINT
Aims of the project
Results
LIBRARY IMPLICATIONS
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT AND AWARENESS
EARLY FINDINGS
Geographical distribution
Age and Sex
Usage
KIND OF USAGE
TRAINING
EVOLUTION OF IT POINT