(This article appeared in Campus Review v.6 no.43 6-12 November 1996)
The National Scholarly Communications Conference in Canberra October 21-22 focussed attention on the relative lack of co-ordinated approaches to the intellectual infrastructure of libraries and IT in Australia compared to overseas. In Australia each university because of the Liberal funding "nicks" and the wage rise "non component", will have to reduce operating grants significantly. Australian university infrastructure providers are also caught in the competition versus co-operation syndrome between universities. Input to the Dearing Review Committee in the UK points out the need for rationalisation of infrastructure resources.
The projected DEETYA Review of Higher Education will have to pay particular attention to this area given its future importance in delivery of teaching and research resources and the unwillingness of the Australian Research Council to interfere in the local autonomy of universities by "top-slicing" as in the UK. The British "Follett Report" advocates an urgent need for a co-ordinated approach to Library and IT provision stating "as a policy of non-interaction will in all likelihood result in the entrenchment of historical inequalities between institutions, a clear policy direction on a national basis must be developed. Government interference in the autonomy of institutes is not proposed, but government involvement in policy direction for the higher education system in key areas such as IT is advocated".
The Australian Higher Education Review will need to take note of some recent overseas reports. The South African National Commission on Higher Education Working Group on Libraries and Information Technology, Final Draft Report, in a comprehensive review of resources and trends in higher education (<http://star.hsrc.ac.za/nche/wglit/cover.html>), calls for an increased co-operative structure at a time when South African infrastructure resources are severely affected by the decline of the rand and a huge pent up demand for education. Recommendation 11.23 to 11.25, for example, suggest that earmarked funding might be channelled towards 'smart solutions' to the problem of the mass supply of identical texts to large numbers of students.
In this context there is currently no Australian Government co-ordinated vision for nationally co-ordinated library and IT provision. The DEETYA Infrastructure Grants Committee receives one off unco-ordinated bids usually for CD-Roms, GIS facilities and local infrastructures but has no authority to reallocate that money into co-ordinated activities across the whole sector. The much reduced DEET higher education policy bureaucracy are aware of some of the international activities in this field but in such a political arena where Vice-Chancellor's determine needs in terms of individual autonomy there is a need for a national "champion". Significant economies of scale can result from nationally co-ordinated initiatives which are even more essential in the reduced straits of all universities.
Derek Law, Pro Vice-Chancellor of King's College, London, a speaker at the Canberra Scholarly Communications Conference, has recently said the FIGIT UK Group had to aim for "revolution" rather than "consensus" and "interaction" rather than "democracy" to achieve results in Britain. The FIGIT programme "aims to deliver services and do this over the whole system and not just for the favoured few". They aimed to provide "low hanging fruit" which was within the reach of the undergraduate as well as the research professor!
Sir Brian Follett, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, has recently highlighted the importance of the "Anderson Report". Report of the Group on a National/Regional Strategy for Library Provision for Researchers (3 July 1996). Dr Michael Anderson looked at the problem of support for UK research and eventually decided that the future strategy had to be in national collaboration and co-operation with earmarked support for "para-national" centres. They also advocate funding scholars via travel funds to go to collections rather than each university trying to build them up! One science academic from the University of Western Sydney told me recently he had to live for six weeks in a caravan parked outside a British tube station in order to be able to afford research in the British Library. He may be a clever academic but is the way to ensure a clever country?
Libraries and IT have to be viewed within this whole scholarly communications framework where more "knowledge" will be produced in the next ten years if present trends continue than has been the case in the whole of the rest of the twentieth century. The purchasing power of university libraries has been crippled by two decades of inflation at 10-15% a year in the costs of books and journals, coupled with the continuing explosion in the number of titles published and the extremely high costs of commercial electronic resources.
On average, university libraries are purchasing only 65% of the books and 70% of the journals per student that they were purchasing in the late 1980s. Australia's largest university library, the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, for example, could in 1994 purchase only 51% of the books and 50% of the journals per student it could purchase in 1988. In the electronic area, the US National Science Foundation has provided $A33.8 million for digital library projects and the British Government has earmarked $A40 million for cooperative library projects. Similar Australian Government funding has totalled $A5 million after the 1993 Scholarly Communication Forum but there is no certainty of any further funding, despite Senator Vanstone recognising the problems of infrastructure in pre and post election statements.
The non-salary increase provision in the Liberal budget as the time bomb ticking to explode across campuses. To take an example, a combined three year 12% cut, if evenly distributed across resources and services, would mean 81,121 books and 39,222 journals cut from Australian university libraries collecting policies. For 1997 the ANU Library is contemplating cuts of nearly $300,000 in its science serial vote, while others like Adelaide, UWA and Queensland will have to face significant reductions. Australia has few "tall library poppies" to cut down. The major research collections are falling way behind those the international overseas counterparts. Toronto University Library's book and serial vote in 1996 is itself larger than the total budget of Sydney University Library. There are no Stanfords, Yales, let alone overseas legal deposit libraries, to provide the backbone to the increasingly stretched university libraries of Australia.
The National Library, if ever it aspired to be a major repository like the Library of Congress and the British Library (witness the 1996 debates in the letter columns of The Australian and other newspapers), has now publicly nailed its colours to a very much reduced collecting role - only 9% of its operating grant is to be spent on books and serials. The university libraries are in many areas of intellectual endeavour the major research collections in the country. The State libraries, despite their historically rich collections, eg. State Library of Victoria, are no longer major players in new acquisition terms. The declining book intake of Australian libraries is a matter of national concern. It's difficult for individual academics to get excited that libraries buy less and less books nationally when one's job or department is being lost or wound down but it is a long term crisis which will be reflected in an Australian intellectual poverty in future years.
It is clear from the UK, South African and US State models that there are significant benefits, both economically and intellectually, for a small sum of money to be retained for national "deals" which otherwise cannot be negotiated by single universities or even regional consortia. A number of major publishers ranging from Academic Press to Blackwell Science to Reed Elsevier are currently offering full text electronic proposals including mirror sites to Australian universities which could be accommodated by a national co-ordinated approach such as the UK FIGIT project. These deals allow 24 hour access to full text journals with search engines tailored to user needs to topics and text but could be multiplied because no-one university can deal with the proposals done yet national funds are not available to provide for all thirty eight universities.
Libraries and universities need effective infrastructures for access delivery mechanisms yet the Telstra AARNet cost monopoly means that IT Directors are having to "pull the plug" across universities on network access because of increased costs which will impact on educational access. Costs in the USA, partly due to competition are far lower for the individual, let alone the institution to access the Net. Universities will probably need to re-establish some form of "RNO/AARNet" with its own dedicated high speed broadband network, perhaps incorporating EDNA needs. There is little point economically in establishing mirror sites of major data, eg, full text journals, if Telstra charges the same tariff for domestic as it does for international tariffs to placate the relatively small traffic Internet service providers.
The situation in regard to student reading is even more bleak. Overseas trends are reflecting even more increased use of "course packs", customised print outs of articles either packaged and sold through bookshops or copy centres or by Departments. The ANU Law Faculty is estimated to print over 3 million pages each year for "reading bricks". Less and less browsing is being undertaken and text book purchasing is in decline both for currency and for economic reasons. If students have to pay more for their courses they will buy even less text books!
For the new university scenarios of the 21st century where teaching and learning can be place remote, where life long learning is required, where long held educational models of "teacher talk, text book memorisation and moving people from box to box" (Oblinger & Moruyama. Distributed Learning. CAUSE, 1996) are no longer valued then local, national and Internet resource sharing is essential.