Round Table No. 7
The Distributed National Collection
Article 4(g) of its Royal Charter states that the AAH is 'to assist and promote the development of libraries in Australia '. It is the only one of the four National Academies to have a specific responsibility to do so - admittedly only 'in the field of the Humanities'. This is not surprising. The Humanities, more than other fields of intellectual endeavour, are vitally dependent on libraries for both advanced teaching and research.
The primary focus of the Academy is Australian scholarship in the Humanities at international level and its research infrastructure at national level. Its point of view is that of the user of essential services, the facilitated not the facilitator. Bear in mind, however, that another purpose enshrined in the AAH Charter [4(h)], is 'to act as a consultant and an advisory body [i.e. to government and government bodies] in matters concerning the Humanities', when confronting the fact that in all the working groups on research library infrastructure development in recent years, such as that of DEETYA, the National Priority (Reserve) Fund, and including the DNC project, neither this Academy - nor, I believe, any of the other Academies - have been formally asked to participate. This is in no way a comment on the outcomes of those efforts, but it does make this present NAF initiative particularly timely. The National Academies will expect to participate in the future. Ultimately, 'libraries are too important to be left to librarians'.
Another timely factor in this context is the ARC Strategic Review of Research and Research Training in the Humanities being conducted by AAH in parallel with a similar strategic review by the Social Sciences Academy. Nothing like this has happened for the humanities in Australia for nearly 40 years, in fact since the comprehensive survey edited by Grenfell Price, The Humanities in Australia , published in 1959. That was two years after the Murray Report in 1957, which ushered in the golden quarter of a century of the three Ms-Murray, Menzies and Martin-for university libraries as for most other areas of the tertiary sector. Among the terms of reference for the current review, such as 'developing a picture of where the disciplines within the humanities should (might?) be in ten to fifteen years and a strategy for getting there' is the injunction to 'project future requirements for library resources and likely future developments in machine-readable data resources'. Futurologists wanted!
The ARC Humanities Review is due to be finished in the next two or three months. In general terms, from twenty-six separate discipline area surveys there emerges a picture of remarkably high quality and wide range of scholarship in humanities research in Australia at the present time, in comparison with any country of similar population. This occurs across the board, whether in Philosophy, English, Archaeology, South-east, East or South Asian studies, British and European History, Cultural and Media studies, etc. It was the beneficiary of the vast improvement of library holdings and facilities for research following the Murray Report in the period from 1960 to the mid to late 1980s. That period has now come to an end and these achievements are under very serious threat from the net contraction of public funding for universities. (For detail, see Peter Karmel's submission to the West inquiry.) This is felt in the reductions in library accessions of monographs and serials, but also in the rapidly deteriorating staff/student ratios-a return to the 1950s-which seriously downgrades the effective time and opportunities for research. I shall return to the time factor shortly.
Among five areas identified in the Review where collaborative rather than competitive arrangements between universities are needed to sustain the humanities in the future, three have relevance to the evolution of the DNC: these are: (i) Libraries; (ii) State-based Centres for the Humanities; (iii) IT services - not in any preconceived order of importance.
(i) Libraries
The vital importance of good, well-stocked libraries to all scholars in the humanities cannot be overstated. 'Print collections will continue to be the most appropriate means of storing and accessing information for many purposes' and 'digital information is unlikely to replace print publication in the foreseeable future' (not from the Review, but fromAustralian Scholarly Information Infrastructure, 1996, §4.2, 7.2). That certainly applies to the humanities-for most, rather than many purposes. It is not necessary or practical to have libraries equal to the best by international standards in every metropolitan city in Australia. The 'best' can be 'the enemy of the good' in libraries as elsewhere. But the rating of at least one comprehensive collection for research and postgraduate teaching purposes in the humanities cannot be allowed to fall below the good to very good in any of the major centres in Australia. $10 million can go a long way towards this end, as the Murray Committee demonstrated.
It is appreciated that no Australian library, not even the National Library of Australia now, can be expected to maintain a fully comprehensive print collection. What is needed now is action on useful building blocks of a workable DNC, what may be called 'Regional Distributed Collections-within metropolitan cities. Within each regional system, university and state libraries should undertake to make sure that there are significant print collections in particular fields appropriate to the needs of that region, with computer links to cover the inadequacies. Bibliographical services are already available, for which we acknowledge the valuable role of the NLA in establishing the National Bibliographic Database (NBD). These Regional DCs should be reinforced by linked computer networks both within Australia and internationally. For such a collaborative policy to be successfully implemented, a degree of top-slicing of central funding will be needed to make the participation of individual institutions financially viable, to ensure comprehensive collections are available across the nation while avoiding unnecessary duplication and rarified items.
The AAH, in its Strategic Review, will be recommending that a Working Group, under the aegis of NAF, be established to institute, in full cooperation with the NLA, University, State and other libraries and archives, an Australia-wide DNC that would be linked with Regional DCs in States and metropolian centres as appropriate.
(ii) The State-based Centres for the Humanities
These are to have a supporting and advisory role in the formation of the proposed Regional Distributed Collections. [For the proposal and supporting argument see the forthcoming Strategic Review of the Humanities.]
(iii) Information Technology and the Humanities
No one doubts the immense importance of IT services and their development in virtually every area of universities, in libraries and in the humanities generally as much as anywhere else.
The AAH supports the thrust of the NLA's submission to the West Review that DEETYA establish a National Information Steering Committee (NISC) to provide policy and funding advice to the Commonwealth on national information/library infrastructure development for the higher education system and notes with satisfaction that the membership suggested for the Committee includes 'the Academies', albeit like Benjamin, at last.
One should note, less sanguinely, however, the poor track record of the Commonwealth in supporting such grand designs, including the nil response to the Ross Report (1990) and the limited result from the Senate Inquiry into the Funding of Research (1993). The uncosted tends to remain the unfunded!
For the humanities the most important issue now and for the near future in the shifting concept of a Distributed National Collection remains: what is to be distributed? What is the balance to be struck between the printed and the electronic formats, with the attendant funding implications. (Ironically, a major complaint of humanities scholars, who have as great a claim to up-to-date IT as in any other disciplines, is the lack of resources to exploit IT.)
Although IT promises to serve many important purposes for scholarly communication, the replacement of books with IT is not one of them. I think it was Harry Fairhurst, the Cambridge University Librarian, who warned us that 'the printed book is established technology that is far too successful to abandon'. Even on rational economic grounds. Has anyone yet estimated the likely cost of the computer equipment that will have to be written off as obsolete and useless by the year 2010, compared with the the cost of acquiring, preserving and storing all the printed materials-monographs, serials etc.-needed between now and then? In financial terms, a prudent investment adviser of our intellectual future would choose a balanced portfolio, to be reviewed as the promised returns are realised or not.
Which brings me finally to the modus operandi (I almost said the modem operandi) of the typical humanities scholar. She/he works on her own, not as part of a group, collects her primary material from archives, documents, corpora etc. or on location, culls the literature, both monographs and serials, anaylyses, reads, reflects, writes, perhaps discusses and revises. This usually requires frequent visits to a good library for literature searches, multiple checking of texts, references etc. The main relevant factors are: Accessibility, Cost, and Time-ACT for short. Accessibility-a wide variety of texts, standard books and periodicals, must be available for consultation. Summaries will not do. Exhaustive collections are not needed everywhere or indeed anywhere. There are too many periodicals contributing to academic pollution-the best hundred or so in any given field ought to be enough to enlighten or confuse even the best scholar. Cost-the blessing of a good library is that multiple consulation of texts, periodicals, references etc. is cost free from the shelf. Interloan charges are sufficient to control or deter all but the compulsive compiler. Time-a key factor in the efficiency of the research process. Rapid, if not instant, consultation is essential. For more thorough and leisurely study, borrowing rights are required.
As for the internet, the web or any electronic system, for it to detain the scholar in his study, and seduce him/her from the pleasures of a good library, all the above requirements must be met in full: rapid, cost-free, full-text display and downloading of the contents of a good research library of primary document collections, books, serials, and visual material. But the reality is that copyright exactions and electronic cost recovery alone are more than likely to rule this out for the foreseeable future, unless the millenium arrives and they become virtually free to screen. It would be helpful to hear what realistic projections have been made, or can be made, of the order of user costs for the IT future. Or is IT part of a post-year-2000 problem?
The title 'library' is ultimately derived from the Latin word 'liber' meaning 'book' or, hopefully, from the plural 'libri'. In a word, a library which makes unbalanced cuts in collecting books is practising a risky and uneconomic form of emasculation, for which the phrase 'a library without walls' is a quite inadequate description.
Paul Weaver