I confess to being just a little bemused when I received Diane's email request that I fill in this slot. I understand that I am to give the libraries' perspective on the challenge of providing research support at the end of this millenial decade, but you must understand that I come to do so from a university which has no pretensions to having a research library of any significance. I have however worked most of my life among sandstone or ivy, and in the glory days when a university library really could aspire to collecting all relevant scholarly publishing, or at least the current output of it. So I was gently educated, even if now I dwell in outer darkness. But then I reflected that perhaps my present position is not a bad one from which to comment on the topic in hand, because the longer the 'crisis' in scholarly publishing continues - and there is no sign of its abating - the more alike do the problems of all libraries become. The darkness is creeping up on us all.
When I last addressed one of these Roundtables I said amongst other things that from the libraries' point of view the behaviour of academic researchers as authors is dysfunctional. I do not want to go over this ground - we are all presumably familiar with it and I assume most of those present here represent the converted - you are prepared to contemplate change. Let me simply repeat that the present system of scholarly communication serves the needs of academics as careerists far better than it serves them as researchers.
So what is to be done? When confused I find it useful to go back to basics, so what I intend to do first is ask some very simple questions about the purposes of libraries, and suggest some answers. I hope the answers I offer will lead us to the conclusion that libraries as we know them were the solution to a problem of one era which will not suit the new one without radical redesign, and that they will also suggest the basis on which that redesign should take place and what practical new solutions libraries might offer.
I am painfully aware that I will be saying nothing new in the next few minutes. However I believe the value of gatherings such as this is less in any unlikely new discoveries or theories that may be advanced than in the opportunity they offer to continue a dialog which will hopefully lead to a change in the demands and expectations of the clients of libraries, because unless we have such changes we are much constrained from adopting new ways of meeting the needs of researchers.
So I ask: Why do universities have libraries?
Silly question you may think, but I remember it was asked in all seriousness by the good members of Parliament in Western Australia when they were debating the budget for the proposed University in about 1911. (I don't remember this personally you understand, but I once wrote a history of the Library of UWA). Why, they asked in tones of outrage, were they paying all this money for academic staff if they didn't know everything? Why did they need a library?
And that brings us to one reason we built libraries - because the time is long gone when anyone could know everything, even everything in one's own discipline, or when one scholar could collect all that they might need in their own personal library.
So the first responsibility of university libraries is to collect, originally to collect everything that might reasonably be needed by the members of the university, present and future. Of course the crisis in library funding, if that is what it is, means that that ambition has had to be recast, so that we now collect not what we need but what we can afford.
The second responsibility is to preserve, if not everything we collect then everything that might be of future value to the scholars in the institution we serve. The function of collecting can be done by individuals, and many of our older libraries have benefitted from the bequest of personal libraries of great value, but the function of preservation can really only be done by an organisation like a library.
The final basic function of libraries is to organise the materials collected and preserved. This is an intellectual as well as a practical activity and without it the first two functions are virtually useless.
It's interesting that today the emphasis is less and less on these core functions. Most staff are engaged in 'add-on' services of one kind and another, from lending services to internet training, and these are probably the functions of the library that are most appreciated by most users, because most of our users after all are not researchers but students. It's also some of these newer functions that people say are likely to survive the presumed death of the conventional library. I would contend however that it is the basic activities described above that are required in the new situation in which the research libraries find themselves, and which I will now describe.
The 'crisis in scholarly publishing' aka. the crisis in libraries, is most often attributed to the inflation in journal prices which has continued for the past two decades. Because this is seen as the prime villain, much effort has gone into tracking and quantifying this inflation, through measures such as the Monash index, so that libraries could use such indexes as an argument for increased funding. The objective was to maintain the real purchasing power of library budgets. Now if libraries are a good and necessary thing, and if they are failing, as they manifestly are, to achieve their objectives of comprehensive support for research, then any measure which helps them do better has to be good. The problem is that maintaining purchasing power will not maintain adequacy, for the simple fact is that inflation in prices is only part, and to my mind a lesser part of the problem.
The greater part is the inflation in publishing, the sheer volume of scholarly outpourings in print, and the continual division and merger of disciplines to create new fields of study. This phenomenon also has been widely recognised. (For attempts at quantification and graphing of both price inflation and growth in publications, I refer you to the Mellon study of 1992.) Whatever weight you give to either factor however, the end result is the same. The university library today has reached the same point as the individual scholars' libraries that preceded it - it cannot collect, preserve and organise a comprehensive or even sufficient representation of recorded knowledge to properly support research needs.
So libraries are failing to collect, and in the conventional library what they do not collect they cannot preserve or organise.
We need to adapt the original solution and move to a higher level of cooperation and sharing of resources, i.e., cooperative arrangements that extend well beyond the boundaries of the single institution. On the whole I think this premise is well accepted by librarians However they are the servants of their universities and until the mind-sets of their users changes little is likely to happen.
We can try to change the mind-sets of academics as producers of the published flood, and persuade them to solve the problem at its source and stop publishing so much, or at least stop publishing on paper. I give this scenario about the chance of a showball in hell. Or we can persuade them that cooperation is good. Threats that if we don't cooperate our libraries will become increasingly inadequate, and increasingly similar as we all contract to core titles, are likely to have the effect that threats usually do, i.e., minimal. Or we can promise that the alternative guarantees them the amenity they value in a local collection, while offering much more.
This 'much more' can only come from initiatives at the national or regional level, and it can only happen if all the potential players are prepared to save, beg, borrow or steal the resources necessary to build something over which no one institution can have complete control.
The political challenges in achieving this outcome should not be underestimated. For example, I have been loosely talking about what 'we' must do. But who is this 'we'? Is it the government? Is it the AVCC? Is it CAUL? Is it the Academies? Is the National Library at the table? Is it necessary to contrive some new body to represent all these interests, and if so, are we comfortable about ceding it power and resources? And can universities square such cooperation with the pressures to compete? Can we convince our vice-chancellors and the government that cooperation is necessary if we are to compete for excellence, and that the alternative is mediocrity or worse for everyone?
In building this shared resource - call it the new DNC, or the national virtual library, or the national information infrastructure or anything you like - we must take account of the past as well as the future. The new technologies are sexier, and can deliver wondrous services in relatively uncomplicated ways, and in fact the networks that support them are the sine qua non of any collaboration. We also need to remember however that our printed stores of research materials will be vital for a long time yet, and that the burden of preserving and supplying them falls disproportionately on the older institutions. We have to seek efficiencies in preserving this material, through shared stores like that at CAVAL, so the old universities can fulfill their obligations at least cost. We also have to properly apportion the costs of access to materials bought by one library but available to others. It may sound strange for someone from a new and poor library like mine to argue for higher document delivery charges (tho' actually USQ is a net lender). The benchmark for charges is set by dedicated overseas services like BLDSC or the various commercial operations. The Australian choice and necessity is to try to fashion an efficient document delivery service from a distributed system operating out of libraries which have other functions and priorities. It will only be a success if that work is properly recompensed and not regarded as 'noblesse oblige'.
I submit that the core functions of any supra-library library we might fashion will continue to be those described above: to collect, to preserve and to organise. It must apply those functions both to our print resources and to the emerging digital environment, remembering that the explosion of information on the Internet is likely to make even the print flood with which we cannot cope look like a modest stream. The difference between the conventional library and the virtual library however is this. Each conventional library is different, fashioned by the collecting decisions of librarians and academics for the particular needs of institutions. There is nothing individualistic or particular about the virtual library, but for it to be of maximum value to the institution or the individual researcher the skills of selection and organisation which librarians have traditionally applied to print will need to be brought to bear.
There has already been considerable activity in this area by CAUL members, some of it supported by the $5 million from the National Priority (Reserve) Fund. That money will be expended by the end of this year. It has been well used - the results are there in the shared datasets, the subject gateways, the electronic publishing experience gained, the specialised digital collections, and the software developments. Unless funds can be found to continue to support such collaborative ventures, it is difficult to see how the momentum can be sustained. I doubt it will happen on rhetoric and good intentions alone.
University libraries and scholarly communication: study prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by Anthony M. Cummings et al. Washington, Association of Research Libraries for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 1992.
10 July 1997