Almost a decade after it was formalised at the Australian Libraries Summit in 1988, the distributed national collection, or DNC, has failed to fulfil its promise. The reasons are many but include institutional territoriality, wilful confusion about the concept, the practices of scholars and a failure to reinvent the concept into the electronic information environment. It is clear the comprehensive universal library is neither achievable nor desirable but that we need to establish a sustainable information environment which depends on collaborative library strategies, a strong underlying communications and information technology infrastructure, an effective quality framework, promotion of Australian content and the effective use of expert staff.
My purpose today is not to rehearse the history of the Distributed National Collection, which we have all come to know and love as the 'DNC', but to explore how we might proceed from this point to ensure that research and scholarship in Australia are well supported and well served by our national information resource.
As ACLIS noted in 1990,
The concept of the "Distributed National Collection" was given a measure of formality in Australia by the resolutions of the Australian Libraries Summit in October 1988 … [but] the idea of an Australian "national collection" which is in fact distributed, ie there are parts of it held in different libraries throughout Australia, is neither a conceptual breakthrough, nor is the idea new.1
The endorsement by the Libraries Summit and the subsequent widespread adoption of the concept by ACLIS, CAUL, the AVCC and other bodies, did however give it a wider currency and a tighter definition. It was agreed that the DNC was the "aggregation of all library collections in Australia whether in the public or private sector" and that it should be "adequately recorded and readily accessible" going on to agree that it should be "comprehensive in relation to Australia" and "selective in relation to the rest of the world as present and future needs require". 2
As Neil Radford pointed out, "this is almost a self-evident fact, and has been tacitly acknowledged by Australian librarians for decades, even though they may not have thought of it in such a formal way". 3 In other, and less restrained, words, a statement of the 'bleeding obvious' but nevertheless a useful reminder of the interconnectedness and interdependence of our collections.
Well, almost a decade on, what are the runs on the board?
Precious few, unfortunately. A very few collecting agreements have been established but appear to have little or no impact on collecting patterns. One significant collection, of Latin American materials, was transferred from the National Library of Australia to Latrobe University Library to build on that Library's strength on the region. There has been a useful dialogue between librarians and scholars in regard to Asian studies with some limited collaboration resulting, particularly in relation to South Asia, but very little progress has been made in other areas despite the efforts in chemistry, medicine and agriculture.
The application of the Conspectus collection description methodology has provided some interesting data of doubtful validity on collection strengths in some research libraries but is of no value to the scholar who is seeking particular titles or nodes of strength in precise areas.
We have a stronger and more comprehensive National Bibliographic Database through which we can determine the locations of some 20 million items in Australian libraries, but still excluding some very significant collections.
Our document delivery system continues to function remarkably well using essentially the same technologies and policies as a decade ago but is poised for dramatic improvement with the introduction of the JEDDS, which will allow requesting directly from, and delivery directly to, the scholar's desktop.
In fact, the greatest advances have been in areas not specifically designated as being within the purview of the DNC.
The success of the CAUL Datasets Program has been outstanding. The concerted application of a very small amount of National Priority (Reserve) funding, via the AVCC's Standing Committee on Information Resources, has led to a dramatic improvement throughout Australia in library based and desktop access to bibliographic databases, ABS data and, increasingly, full text articles. Related work in the Electronic Publishing and Improved Information Infrastructure Programs has given greater insights into the effective exploitation of the potential of networked information resources. We have not, however, cracked the question of ongoing access to electronic information - how do we archive it in a way which ensures that it will be accessible and useable, and not merely recoverable, if and when it may be required, decades hence?
Some progress has been made in regard to 'archiving' printed materials. The establishment of the CARM Centre by CAVAL has been a significant advance in providing a purpose designed, well situated, integrated facility for managing 'last copies' of library holdings. However, we still have very serious concerns about the long term preservation of the materials printed during the last century on acidic paper. It is clear that digitisation is the answer but large scale digitisation can only be done collaboratively and must be standards based within a framework which will ensure preservation and ongoing access in perpetuity.
In the same period we have seen a continuation of the decline in the purchasing power of Australia's university libraries which have faced an underlying cost pressure of over 8 % pa during the decade. At the same time, the number of titles, both for monographs and periodicals, published each year continues to increase so our libraries are able to purchase an ever smaller proportion of the world's publications.
Why has the DNC, so bravely launched and so universally endorsed, run aground? Why, a decade on, can we say little more than we could at the Australian Libraries Summit?
There are many reasons, but four appear to have been crucial:
Institutional territoriality is the nature of the university beast. It continues to rampage through our libraries, cutting off collections in their prime as research and teaching interests change and uncoordinated research initiatives spawn malformed collections, frequently duplicating those elsewhere. Other initiatives, notably the Cooperative Research Centres or CRCs, are launched with claims that they will need no library support, so often the transparent dishonesty it appears.
Such institutional territoriality has led to wilful confusion about the concept, which is fundamentally so simple. The concept of the DNC was based on 'enlightened self interest', the idea that university libraries would collect what they needed to collect to support study and research at their institutions but make it available nationally so that all could benefit reciprocally. Some librarians, however, have confused it with the earlier subject specialisation schemes in which libraries took responsibility for certain subject areas and collected as comprehensively as possible in them with out regard to local needs. Such library commentators have declared that they could never do that because of their responsibility to their own, and used that as an excuse to do nothing.
Scholars too have continued to contribute to the problem as they continue to give away our national intellectual capital which we then have to purchase back at extraordinary cost. The unbridled concentration on quantity of publications as a measure of academic productivity and repute continues to exacerbate the problem. Within the university, we have silly demands to duplicate expensive serials in libraries not a 100 yards away from each other - not to mention the patent inefficiency of closely located separate branch libraries.
But above all, we, both librarians and scholars, have failed to reinvent the concept of the DNC into the burgeoning electronic information environment. In spite of the work of the groups mentioned above and the papers presented at these Scholarly Communications Forums, and in other fora, we still think of the DNC in concrete, physical terms as an aggregation of printed materials. We have not expanded the concept into the electronic world with its emphasis on access to information and manipulation of texts and images.
Underlying these failures is an almost fundamentalist faith that 'the university library will provide', in the face of all the evidence that it cannot. As the summary of the UK Anderson Report noted
… it was now neither feasible, nor even desirable, to expect each institution itself to provide for all the research needs of its staff and users' (Report, paragraph 226). Arguably, this aim was not possible in any institution in the western world.4 [emphasis added]
Clearly, this underlying, but generally unacknowledged, belief in the comprehensive universal library is unsustainable.
But why should it matter? As the economic rationalists would have it, the sustainability of this information environment is a matter for the market. The best research and teaching, and hence the best institutions, will prosper in the market. If high quality library resources should be needed to be the 'best', then the best institutions will invest in them and we will have first rate collections where they are needed.
But this is bunk! Library collections, in print and electronic, published and archival, are not simply creatures of market investment. While we must indeed invest in them, they are more organic, requiring long term commitment to their development. Thus we need to think rather in ecological terms than in market terms when considering the nation's information infrastructure. Just as we are concerned with the sustainability of our land use for agriculture, mining, etc, we must be concerned with the sustainability of our information infrastructure.
In order to determine why this matters, it is important to tease out the purposes of the academic and research library. In the scholarly enterprise, library collections fill a number of roles, including:
They provide the tracks in the sand by which we can see where scholars have gone and what they have discovered. This is the invaluable historical record of scholarship through which the intellectual precursors and successors may be tracked. Sometimes they lay dormant to assume importance at a later date, as in the case of Gregor Mendel's famous paper. It is a crucial archival role which is difficulty to justify in direct market terms but it provides the seeds of information from which future research can develop. It may be considered to be analogous to maintaining the diverse genetic wealth of our natural environment, a measure of our national wealth.
Publishers, referee systems and libraries supply an essential element of the recognition and accountability apparatus for researchers. Through such measures as citation impact studies, they provide a measure of 'IDP', the 'intellectual domestic product', of the nation. In this respect, they are an indicator of productivity but not an input to production.
Library collections also provide a current awareness service through which scholars, and students developing into scholars, can stay abreast of developments in their disciplines and others of interest. In fact, the informal networks are much more effective and timely for those in a discipline - this role is primarily of benefit to those developing into a discipline or those looking across at cognate disciplines. It is probably the easiest role to justify in market terms because it relates to current areas of study.
The collections also provide the stuff for study, the texts, archives and other resources which are studied themselves, such as literature, or which contain the data to be studied, such as the reports of government authorities, remote sensing data, etc. When used such material is easy to justify in market terms because it is a direct input into production but it must be collected and preserved preemptively, without knowing for certain whether it may be useful one day. Its husbandry is analogous to landcare, ensuring that intellectual resources will be available to support the as yet unknown research of the future.
Without pushing the analogy with ecological sustainability too far, it is clear that the development of a sustainable information environment cannot be achieved by simply responding to short term market signals, but rather requires long term commitment and investment. In this we run up against the essential conundrum: effective competition by universities depends on widespread collaboration by university libraries.
During the last few decades, Australia has produced some 2% of the world's scientific information and some 3% of its technological information, an achievement far in excess of our proportion of the world's population but consonant with our proportion of global exports. But there are worrying signs that we are slipping, that our share is decreasing. 5 This is probably a consequence of more rapid expansion in other countries affecting our relative position but it is nevertheless a matter for national concern. It is a sign that the increased investment in information and information technologies in such countries as Malaysia and Singapore will give them a similar spurt to that they achieved in GDP as the 'tiger economies'. Australia will be left behind if it does not make a similar national commitment to invest in its national information infrastructure.
As suggested above, we, both scholars and librarians, must accept what we really know already: the individual universal, comprehensive research library is not achievable. Nor is it desirable because it implies a massive duplication of resources across the nation and worldwide. We must accept that a sustainable information environment depends, absolutely, on cooperative collection development.
And that collection development must be reinvented into the electronic age. It must take the paradigm of access which fully exploits the potential of networks but which recognises that distributed access nevertheless requires that information must be held somewhere. It must encompass both printed and electronic information, published analyses and raw data, research and creativity.
We cannot continue to be fixated on some mythical halcyon age in which the universal library could provide all the books and journals we might ever need. We must recognise that the use of information evolves, exploiting new approaches and changing the ways in which we see the world. As Robert Darnton has pointed out,
… after 1500, the printed book, pamphlet, broadside, map, and poster reached new kinds of readers and stimulated new kinds of reading. Increasingly standardized in its design, cheaper in its price, and widespread in its distribution, the new book transformed the world. It did not simply supply more information. It provided a mode of understanding, a basic metaphor of making sense of life.6
As we move into the electronic age, we must recognise that it, too, will "stimulate new kinds of reading" and we must facilitate that development by providing a flexible and responsive information environment, particularly in support of research and scholarship.
Thus, as CAUL has argued in its submission to the West Review7, there is a national interest in ensuring that we have ready and affordable access to high bandwidth networks, readily available high performance computing facilities, collaborative access to expensive specialist equipment, and a sustainable national information resource. It is crucial that the Commonwealth and the universities should endorse and actively support the establishment of a sustainable information environment to support research and by allocating significant funding to information infrastructure of national importance. This would recognise both the need for national infrastructure to link the investment made via individual institutions and the major community, and business, benefits of a strong national information infrastructure. The benefits of such targeted funding may be seen, most spectacularly, in the creation of AARNet.
While its clearly desirable to maintain Government funding levels, it would be beneficial to the nation to actively encourage greater private investment in Australia's university libraries. The Commonwealth could assist university libraries to attract other sources of support by restoring the 150% R&D taxation provision and extending it to include investment in research infrastructure from which the entire community benefits.
As indicated in this paper, CAUL has a comprehensive vision of a sustainable information environment which depends on collaborative library strategies, a strong underlying communications and information technology infrastructure, an effective quality framework, promotion of Australian content and the effective use of expert staff. To establish that sustainable information environment CAUL recommended, inter alia, to the West Committee:
To further the development of a strong national information infrastructure to support research, CAUL recommends the establishment of a National Information Infrastructure Committee, reporting to the Higher Education Council and the Australian Research Council, to evaluate and recommend funding for infrastructure of national benefit. Such a committee should include representation from specialist bodies including the Higher Education Council, Australian Research Council, Council of Australian University Librarians, Committee of Australian University Directors of Information Technology, AVCC Standing Committee on Information Resources and the National Library of Australia.
Through such strategies we will ensure that we move beyond the distributed national collection and into a sustainable information environment for research and study in Australia. This sustainable information environment is a key element of the national infrastructure, as worthy of support from the Federation Fund, a such major capital works projects as the transcontinental railway.