Lecture 10, IMS5016, IMS3616, Information access,

Costs, selection, collaboration: 16 May 2005.

Contents.

1. Three news items.1.1.Journal costs in Australia.1.2.Loss of government publications from websites.1.3.Dutch academics challenge journal publishers.

2.Exam preparation.2.1.There is publicised information, known to everyone.2.2.General principles for effective revision. 2.3.Fear of the unknown.2.4.Examiners’ expectations.

3.Diagram for guidance in assignment two.

4.Collection costs.4.1.Academic journals.4.2.Defining costs in information collection and provision.4.3.Value and costs in relation to logistics.

5.Selection principles.5.1.Costs.5.2.Up-to-dateness; built-in obsolescence.5.3.Treatment, level of appeal5.4.Format quality5.5.Compatibility with existing collection content and systems5.6.Rarity, scarcity5.7.Ease of use5.8.Conformity to norms5.9.Content quality5.10.Review.

6.Work flow and structure of the virtual library.

7.Three solutions to the isolated library.7.1.Consortiums ( = consortia).7.2.Gateways.7.3.Dissolve barriers between virtual institutions.7.4.AARLIN.

1.Three news items.

1.1. Journal costs in Australia.

Bill Pheasant, ‘Technology Threatens Old School Ties,’ inAustralian Financial Review, Education, 8 March 2004, p 29:

Linux did it for Microsoft, fronting a popular campaign against corporate ownership of computing. Now, a global groundswell seeking open access to academic journals is denting the profitable futures of the dominant players, including market leader Reed Elsevier.

PLoS (Public Library of Science) has joined BioMed Central amid a host of new ‘free’ offerings, each attempting to solve a growing unease about the control of research data, which is frequently paid for and peer-reviewed out of public funds. Elsevier, along with Blackwell Publishing, gave evidence before a British parliamentary science and technology committee last week that heading down the open access path would damage academic research, end the peer review system and mean more costs for universities to subsidise their researchers.

Today , before the same committee, the promoters of a new way will cry ‘viva la revolucion!’ Elsevier, the UK-based publishing house, last month reported a 75 per cent profit increase in 2003 to $1.24 billion on slightly lower revenues of $11.8 billion in a tight business environment. Other big players in the industry include Blackwell, Kluwer and Taylor & Francis. But it is evident that the foundations of a 300-year-old arrangement between scientists, learned societies and their publishers are getting shaky.

Two weeks ago Deutsche Bank analysts cut their recommendations on Elsevier from buy to hold, and took 12 per cent from their 2005 earnings estimates. BNP Paribas's initial assessment last year was underperform. In Australia, university libraries across the country face the same issue: technology has given researchers unimagined access to the global pool of knowledge, but the cost of entry is becoming prohibitive. In 2002, according to information given to the Council of Australian University Libraries, the $4.9 million periodicals publication budget for the University of Adelaide was 86 per cent of its new material expenses; the remainder was largely spent on books.

For the University of Queensland, journals accounted for 85 per cent of its $11.8 million budget, and the Australian National University spent 88 per cent of its $7.3 million library budget on periodicals. One of the country's largest academic institutions, Monash University, added 29,791 titles in 2002: 28,100 were part of aggregations of electronic collections as part of bundled services, giving students access to a potential 70,000-plus titles.

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The data in the United States tells the same story of escalating costs. In 1992, Cornell University in New York State spent $US4.1 million on journals; in 2002, the cost was 65 per cent higher. At Stanford, the price rose by 140 per cent in the decade to $US11.9 million. According to the web log of Peter Suber , one of the academics pushing for open access, the provost of the University of Maryland, William Destler, last week issued a statement supporting the university's libraries, which cut their bundled collections to retain the ability to cancel specific Elsevier titles.Quoting information consultants OutSell, Suber said Stanford's faculty senate had also adopted a resolution supporting library moves to cancel some subscriptions and encouraging faculty to withhold articles from certain publishers. Cornell last year started a free internet publication service, and the administrators of Columbia University are now considering actions over journal prices.

In Australia, the battle for the $220 million university library content budget has made librarians ‘the meat in the sandwich’, according to Madeleine McPherson. McPherson is the president of CAUL, and her firm view is that publishers have been exploiting market power for profit.‘The academic publishing industry, particularly the STM journals science, technology medicine, the high-prestige ones have become more and more expensive. That is very largely as a result of an exploitation by commercial publishers of their monopoly position in the market: that is, you cannot substitute one journal for another,’ she told The Australian Financial Review.

‘Many titles they took over from scholarly societies, but they realised they were a licence to print money. Their responsibility is to their shareholders, and they do what any business would do.’ While CAUL acknowledges publishers' costs have increased with the addition of online services, it does not justify the massive increase in the fees being charged. ‘I think it will take a while to shake out [but] 2003 was a turning point,’ McPherson says.

Stephen May's Australian Academic Press, a Brisbane-based publisher of about 40 journals in the social sciences sector, is watching the debate with fascination. He believes the big players have over-reached, and that the reaction towards open access will continue apace. Not that he is joining up. May is a commercial publisher, but he claims his rates have gone down in some areas, partly due to the technology benefits for publishers. ‘As a small publisher I can put a journal up, and make arrangements with Medline or whoever, so it is part of the global network of journals,’ May says. ‘The big publishers are now so big that they go to the libraries and say 'Here are 800 of our journals. Why don't you buy these 800 titles, and we will bundle them into a package?'

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‘The libraries say, 'We only want these 300', but as a package they tie up libraries' budgets,’ he says. ‘It has meant that they have been able to put the prices up. Academics are saying a toll is being placed on academic research, and that it is obscene.’

Janine Schmidt, University of Queensland's librarian, took on the publishers a few years ago and won substantial discounts. ‘Three years ago there were huge price increases. All the publishers were pushing up subscription costs much higher than the CPI [consumer price index],’ Schmidt says. ‘I think there was quite a backlash, with libraries all over the world cancelling subscriptions. We cancelled a significant number then too.’ UQ entered a joint purchase arrangement with other sandstone institutions and got a joint discount for a bundled service, an arrangement which offers vast numbers of extra publications, and also cuts administrative costs for the publishers.

‘This time last year we took a decision to move away from print to a large extent, to online only. So we have 19,000 titles available online only, and 13,000 print titles, compared with 20,000 titles previously,’ Schmidt says. The change has been welcomed by staff and students, she says, ‘but some of us are concerned long term about the reduction in ownership, and the pricing structures’. ‘Brain Research is the most expensive journal at $35,000 a year, compared with Sustainable Energy at several hundred dollars annually,’ she says. ‘We are all trying to advance scholarship. My concern is that the journals are consuming a greater percentage of our budget at the expense of the monograph [books]. It is really monopolistic behaviour.’

Taylor & Francis, another UK publishing house, holds about 1,000 journals, but offers them title by title rather than as block deals. It is also examining an author-pay scheme, similar to those being pushed by the open-access lobby, where the researcher or their university pays for publication. (Elsevier chief executive Crispin Davies told the parliamentary committee that each article could cost up to GBP30,000 ($AUD72,000) to publish.)

Chris Foster , director of the serials branch of the National Library of Australia, says the electronic use of serials is growing faster than any other sector. ‘We are seeing many publishers moving from print to online only. In terms of what libraries are able to offer their customers, in many ways it is a much better service. We are providing them with journals they would never have had access to before. It is a much wider spectrum of resources,’ Foster says. ‘Some of the downsides are that smaller publishers, if they can't join in with some of the bigger aggregators, might lose their readership and their place in the market.’

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Like all universities, Melbourne gets almost all of its journals from overseas, so its costs are captive to global price changes.Dorothea Rowse, collection management librarian at the University of Melbourne, has taken what she calls a ruthless approach to serial purchases, keeping cost rises to about 10 per cent over the past decade. ‘One of the things we do is called access versus ownership. We don't believe we have to own every journal, and one of the things we do is obtain material an article at a time via interlibrary loans. In science and medicine, they are very happy with this.’

The British Library's delivery service and a Canadian provider of technology and scientific information send the articles for about $US8 each. The university has 16,000 subscriptions, which includes major databases ProQuest 5000, adding tens of thousands more. ‘We do not bundle our journals with Elsevier. We have an agreement for titles which we have chosen, and we control the costs that way.’

However, there is still a big impediment towards any shift to open access publishing of research: university councils. ‘If you are looking for a promotion or a new job, you will be judged on the journals in which you have published, and the ones on BioMed Central and so on don't have any status at all at the moment,’ Rowse says. ‘If you want to improve your CV, you have to publish in the big commercial journals, so they do have a future.’

1.2.Loss of government publications from websites.

Toss Gascoigne, ‘History will vanish into the ether’, in The Australian, 11 May 2005.

TRACKING down government reports is a growing problem for researchers in Australia. Originally published on the web, many reports have become unavailable or difficult to find.

Government departments are increasingly using the web as their primary means of publication. It's quicker and easier and gives much better access in our wired world. And they save money by printing fewer hard copies.

But problems arise when reports are removed from the web or relocated to a new website. This may be as time moves on and webmasters, under pressure to run a tidy site, decide to cut some of the older material. Or it may be when departments merge or split, and the material is moved to a new address but without leaving a trace behind so it can be tracked.

There are no national protocols for how web-based material should be selected and preserved and made available in a systematic way in Australia today. This is a cause of concern to researchers.

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Just how significant is the issue? To find out, I asked this of subscribers to the newsletter of the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences:

"The Australian Library and Information Services seminar, Digital Amnesia, will address issues relating to the access and management of government publications online. The context is a concern that a number of significant publications have disappeared from a range of government websites.

"Have you had experience of this? If so, could you provide details?"

It was quickly apparent I had touched a nerve. Within two days I had received more than 100 responses.

Respondents gave examples of reports that had disappeared; described their battles to track down material as departments were amalgamated or split; talked about the issues caused as new technologies replaced the old, and proposed possible solutions. Just over half said they had not encountered problems.

Material that had been available on the web but has now disappeared included:

* The AGPS Style Manual, available in full on the web a few years ago* Ministerial releases issued before 2004 have been recently removed from the Northern Territory Government website* The National Plan for Women in Agriculture and Resource Management [which] came out in the mid 1990s. It was endorsed by state governments and about 130 rural industry organisations, and formed the basis for policy and action for a number of years.

Typical of the stories was:

"I teach a course on Youth and Society. One of the essay topics is Youth Allowance. There was a major evaluation of the program online at the beginning of the semester and I included the website reference for students. Come week 6 when they are doing the essay the link has disappeared. There is simply a generic message saying the page cannot be found."

One librarian had asked her colleagues to nominate reports they could not find. She then set out on a determined hunt to see if they were really missing. She found them, but concluded that:

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"All of the publications were still available somewhere, but that was often due to good luck, and not the good management of the government agencies that created them.

"Five of the seven titles had disappeared from the website of the creating agency, with no redirects or other assistance given to the would-be reader about how to find the new location."

The crucial point for her was that, while they remained available somehow, somewhere, their discoverability was almost impossible. All of the titles in this small study were reported missing by librarians, all sophisticated users of the internet.

"My impression from this small study is that to this point, we have not yet suffered a serious loss of government information. I have not yet been able to identify any significant government publication that has disappeared altogether. However, there are certainly significant government publications that have disappeared from the creating agency's websites. Government information is definitely dispersed, some of it is very hard to find, and the fact that some of it remains at all is thanks to the whim of the internet archive harvesting robot, rather than to any policy, strategy or plan of commonwealth agencies."

Why was this material moved from the websites? Sometimes it was because IT managers wanted to keep the websites manageable and streamlined, and moved old material off as pressures mounted. Old bookmarks become useless when websites are redesigned. And significant documents are sometimes not seen as significant at the time. It's only in hindsight that we realise they have important historical value.

The loss of old material seems to occur most often where a website has gone through an upgrade, change of staff or change of management, or when a significant project and its attendant publications have come to an end.

Usually older publications are relocated as the structure or focus of thewebsite changes, to make way for new versions or new publications - they are finally removed when they no longer attract much traffic or seem out of place.

One person said that he never expects to find reports more than a couple of years old on a government website: "I presume that a range of issues are involved, including changes of government, changes of bureaucrats at the top and a desire to take a different policy direction from the one mentioned in thereport."

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All these issues were compounded by the march of technology: new software means old reports can become hard to read even if they are available.

Respondents were united in their call for the development of a protocol, funded and implemented across government. Some thought the answer lay in an expansion of the PANDORA archival system run by the National Library ofAustralia.

One correspondent from New Zealand pointed to new legislation passed there earlier this month. Perhaps the answer to the issue in Australia lies in the adoption of legislation with a similar intent to New Zealand's Public Records Bill:

"The bill establishes a framework under which public records can be managed; ensures that the record keeping requirements of the Bill extend to as broad a range of government activities as practicable; and provides for the preservation and accessibility of public archives. In order to achieve these objectives, it provides a legal framework under which public records are created, stored, preserved, disposed of and made accessible.

"The growth in email and the internet has created a new set of challenges, which the bill addresses by requiring agencies to create and maintain records and to make them available over time. Agencies will also need to seek the approval of the chief archivist before they destroy records."

Toss Gascoigne is executive director of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. This is an edited version of his address to the seminar Digital Amnesia: The Challenges of Government Online organised by the Australian Library and Information Association at the National Library of Australia on April 21.

1.3.Dutch academics challenge journal publishers.

Jan Libbenga (libbenga at yahoo.com), ‘Dutch academics declare research free-for-all’, published Wednesday 11 May 2005, 13:06 GMT:

Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website (http://www.darenet.nl/page/language.view/home) on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.

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DAREnet was already launched about a year ago, but for demonstration purposes only. The €2m DARE programme -- a joint initiative by all the Dutch universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) -- harvests all digital available material from local repositories, making it fully searchable. Aside from bibliographical information, the content can be full text, or even audio and video files.

The initiative is clearly not welcomed by commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science. Increasingly, universities complain about the high cost of scientific journals and many argue that the research results should be distributed freely or at significantly less cost to library subscribers.

In Hungary, financier and philanthropist George Soros is also backing a new effort (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/) to provide free and unrestricted access to scientific and other academic literature.

Related stories:

Unis free to rummage through century of physics research (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/25/iop_archive/)Southampton Uni goes Open Access (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/10/southampton_academic_research/)University launches semantic web interface (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/semantic_web/).

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2.Exam preparation for the morning of 9 June 2005.

In week 13, the lecture will be devoted to detailed review and revision of the subject. At this stage, in relation to revision, remember the following points:

2.1.There is publicised information, known to everyone.

There is a large amount of basic available information that is well known to you. The content coverage of the exam will be what is dealt with in all classes, what is available on the subject website and discussion group, and what is covered by assignments.Three hours is available to complete the exam.In addition, 10 minutes is available for reading.The exam is worth 50% of the total marks for the unit.The exam paper requires you to answer multiple-choice questions and write short answers about key ideas, statements, propositions.

2.2.General principles for effective revision.

Engage in on-going revision over the weeks before the exam, to avoid cramming towards the end.Make summary notes of each topic, gradually reducing them in size, as you learn them.Study intensively in bursts, then break for quick exercises and relaxing activities.Revise only a summary of the unit just before the exam.

2.3.Fear of the unknown.

With exams, a fear of the unknown or unexpected is most likely to dominateyour thinking sometimes. You will probably ask yourself questions like:

Will I pass?Do I know enough?Will I be able to remember everything?What if they ask me something that I do not know?

These are normal questions to ask yourself about any personal evaluation, but they will not cause excessive fear if you follow accepted preparation methods.

2.4.Examiners’ expectations.

There are some expectations common to most exams that youshould understand, in order to make the most of your preparatory thinking. Normally, your examiners will be looking to test your:

level of factual knowledge,

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ability to synthesise different aspects of the unit content covered during thesemester,

comprehension of how to link key ideas together, skill at constructing an argument to defend your own view on pre-set topics, ability to produce a solution-answer to posed hypothetical problems, within a limited time-frame, simulating pressured decision-making such as

occurs in real life, speed-thinking and accuracy skills (e.g., answer all multiple-choice

questions in part one).

Readings:

Exam preparation, Academic Skills Unit, La Trobe University, at: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/otd/aw/asu/exampreparation.pdf.

Exam help, Language and Learning Skills Unit, University of Melbourne, at http://www.services.unimelb.edu.au/llsu/resources/exams.html#general.

3.Diagram for guidance in assignment two.

Two key pieces of text from the assignment outline:

1.’A primary facet of scoping is to profile the audience for your report, which in the first instance is the library manager. Also, you will be expected to direct your report at: internal communication and training in the public library; accountability to your user constituency; any organisations co-operating with and within your library sector; and the needs of public relations for your library. In order to address these 5 audiences adequately, you will need also to profile the whole community that your public library serves’.

2.’Two central themes to your overall review are likely to focus on access to and current use of knowledge and entertainment in your public library area. You need to assess what constitutes a good policy. You will also need to discuss whether a policy is helpful to any of your 5 audiences. Try to decide whether or not you believe that your manager will accept your recommendations, i.e., you should make them as realistic as possible. Make sure that you are aware of competitors in the library region (as well as co-operators). Although you do not have to actually write a policy, you do need to show an understanding of what would be relevant content, in order to fulfill the other requirements of this report’.

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These pieces of text can be summarised thus:

1.library manager.2.users. Recommendations3.staff in the library. to your manager4.co-operating about the need for and use ofand competing interactions of a collection developmentorganizations. policy for the local library. 5.public relations role (person/unit?).

4.Collection costs.

Underlying a lot of discussion in the past three lectures the topic of costs, budgets, income, and expenditure has loomed. It has surfaced in relation to the increased cost of scholarly journals, to the costs of superstructure of the concept of the virtual library, to the need for library consortia to rationalise expenditures, and in relation to the purchase of individual electronic resources.

4.1.Academic journals.

We have tackled the problems associated with increased prices of academic journals from a number of perspectives, and much has been published about them. See, for example: Collection manager’s budget at Virginia Commonwealth Univeristy, at: http://www.library.vcu.edu/cm/realign/journal_cost_trends.html, where you can find this dramatic graphic depiction of costs among Academic and research Libraries (ARC) in north America from 2003:

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The costs for scholarly journal subscriptions have experienced double-digit increases for nearly 20 years, a rate far exceeding the U.S. Consumer Price Index. In addition to these inflationary cost increases, many journals and databases are priced by suppliers according to student enrolment, so that increasing enrolments (which Australia has experienced) has also increased costs.

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In the late 1980s the purchase of printed books and journals consumed most of the collection budget of most libraries. Today at Monash the collection budget is about $14 million per annum, and one third is spent on electronic resources, one third on journals and one third on monographs. The growth today is the money spent on electronic resources. Robert Stafford, Collection Management Librarian at Monash, will speak about this in the second half of the lecture. Listen in.

4.2.Defining costs in information collection and provision.

Cost relates the expenditure of resources which are incurred in undertaking a necessary activity. It is assumed that, in order the achieve benefits, paying for one activity means that another will be foregone (not paid for). How to define ‘benefit’ is troublesome, especially in our world, where information has valuable intangible and hidden attributes.

Libraries are unusual organizations in that most of them do not create income and do not seek to make a profit. They are dependent on government or an income-generating host organization for funds. This makes them vulnerable to the vagaries of the financial welfare of the host, and the general economic conditions. Public libraries are funded by local government and state governments together. Public university libraries are funded by the universities and federal government.

More and more the financial well-being of the information technology sector generally affects all forms of information providers. Over the past 20 years, the costs of knowledge content (individual packages or publications) has increased rapidly, whereas the cost of most forms of information technology (for delivery of content primarily, in the early days) has decreased enormously. Demarcation of roles between author, publisher, distributor and user of information has declined markedly in the past 15 years, thanks to the overarching influence of networks. Libraries became integrated into a massive information economy – the largest sector of most developed economies -- from which there is no escape.

4.3.Value and costs in relation to logistics.

Logistics can be used to plot the ‘flows’ of valuable information. Let us assume that a value chain exists in a library context: knowledge is produced, transported, stored, controlled by inventory, gathered (collected), and processed in the library. At each stage it is assumed that value is added, from the point of creation, to the point of ‘consumption’. Of course, in reality the system is rarely so smooth or linear, but describing the chain highlights the different stages of wealth creation associated with knowledge.

Another important aspect of costs relates to allocation. This lecture does not provide answers to the dilemmas posed; it is important to pose some of them, however. How can the price of an information service be defined? It is not easy,

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especially where the delivery of the service is remote. How can you calculate the cost of a loan of an e-book? What will be the cost to a library of a new e-resource that fails? What is the cost to a library user of not finding what she/he needs? How does a librarian calculate the cost of depreciation – e.g., of a network becoming old and malfunctioning? How is long-term maintenance factored into initial cost? If a special library manager wants to charge a work unit within a host organization for services, how can the charges be calculated? If a freelance consultant is called in to set up a new acquisitions system, what is a fair price? There are many variables to try to price. A good source which provides some answers to the thorny questions above is by H. Snyder and E. Davenport (1997), Costing and pricing in the digital age; a practical guide for information services, London: Library Association Publishing, pp 32 – 38.

5.Selection principles.

An obvious point in a library’s activities where value for money is very apparent is at the point of selection of new items for a collection. In the next lecture Jill Wilson, Monash Selection Management Librarian, will speak about processes and costs of acquisitions in detail.

Selection involves deciding what individual packages of knowledge to purchase and make available to users. It is implementation of significant parts of the collection development policy. It requires spending scarce resources, and refusing to commit to other resources. It expects the information professional to be able to determine the relevance and usefulness of resources that are offered to the collection free as gifts.

At this stage it is necessary to understand some of the selection criteria which are commonly applied by libraries to the purchase of new knowledge. Looked at overall, they do not differ very much from the sorts of factors which determine a decision by most of us for an expensive purchase (e.g., a new car). These measures are applied in tutorials this week to e-resources. They can be applied to the purchase of monographs, newspapers, magazines, software, and other packages equally. Make sure that you understand each of them.

5.1.Costs:

5.1.1.Are costs one-off, or ongoing?5.1.2.Does the library gain full ownership, a temporary licence (dealt with in detail in next week’s lecture), a subscription?5.1.3.Is the e-resource copyable by the library?5.1.4.Are there installation costs?5.1.5.Are there servicing costs?5.1.6.What are the processing costs internal to the library?

5.2.Up-to-dateness; built-in obsolescence.

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5.3.Treatment, level of appeal: e.g., toddlers, teenagers, adults, elderly; educational, popular entertainment only; introductory, comprehensive.

5.4.Format quality:

5.4.1.durable?5.4.2.better than others (e.g., print)?5.4.3.potential life expectancy?5.4.4.aesthetic appeal?

5.5.Compatibility with existing collection content and systems:

5.5.1.how well will the e-resource integrate to what is there already?5.5.2.will it complement? add value?5.5.3.will it duplicate? Is duplication desirable?5.5.4.will it promote a balanced collection overall?

5.6.Rarity, scarcity:

5.6.1.is the value of the e-resource unique?5.6.2.is its rarity a drawback?5.6.3.does it only have short-term value?

5.7.Ease of use:

5.7.1.does the e-resource encourage use?5.7.2.how complex is the human computer interface?5.7.3.can it be accessed from multiple points?

5.8.Conformity to norms:

5.8.1.Does the content affirm or challenge values?5.8.2.Is it biased?5.8.3.Is it censorable? (for current Australian censorship rules, for the Internet, see: http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens1.html; and for printed matter, computer games, and film and TV, see: http://www.oflc.gov.au/content.html).5.8.4.Whom will it offend?

5.9.Content quality:

5.9.1.what is the reputation of the creator, of the publisher?5.9.2.who will respect the content of the e-resource in the long-term?

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5.10.Review:

5.10.1.what do others say about the e-resource?5.10.2.are they judging it by objective measures?5.10.3.who else is purchasing it?

If you would like to see some of these criteria turned into part of a collection development policy, see:http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/collection/selection/irpselecttxt.html. For a fuller outline of the criteria mentioned here, see ch 7 of Gorman and Kennedy (1992), as well as ch 3 of J. Kennedy (2002).

6.Work flow and structure of the virtual library

In broad terms there are many similarities between the traditional library and the virtual library, yet some of the techniques and technologies involved mean that the emphasis on issues is not exactly the same.

In the table below, some of the current issues have been grouped within the framework of the virtual library service model. This table serves to summarise several of the issues discussed in this and the last lecture.

THE FRAMEWORK ISSUES

6.1.The User.Access issues, e.g.:

1. access management issues (see also under ‘authentication’ below).

2. how to integrate digital and analogue resources.

3. user acceptance of digital materials as an adequate surrogate for traditional print.

Technological issues:1. Types of workstation, e.g., thin clients

vs. traditional workstations, PC's vs. digital TV.

2. access for people with disabilities (e.g., visually impaired).

Policy issues, e.g.,1. privacy and security,2. personal rights.

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6.2.Authentication.Technological issues, e.g.

1.certification and trust systems.2.smart cards.3.standards and protocols (e.g. X.509, X.400, PGP, LDAP).

Policy issues, e.g.,1.access for ‘non-members,’ or the ‘walk-in’ public.

2.charging for access.

6.3.Common user interface. Technological issues, e.g.,

1. portal and other e-commerce technologies.

2. expert systems.3. search and retrieval language.4. standards for search and retrieval

(Z39.50).5. other standards, e.g. HTTP, SQL,

ODBC.6. how to link to ‘appropriate copy’ using

OpenURL.7. search engines.

Ergonomic issues, e.g.interface design.

6.4.Digitisation of analogue resources. Content and intellectual property issues, e.g.,

1. feasibility and desirability of digitising legacy print collections, and other analogue collections like audio and video tapes, and their associated intellectual property problems.

2. copyright. 3. rights management.

Technological issues, e.g.,1. hardware and software platforms for

information access.2. standards for digitisation (e.g. PDF,

TIFF, ASCII, SGML, XML).

6.5.Electronic resources.Technological issues, e.g.,

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1. formats for delivery (e.g. TIFF, JPEG, GIF, SGML, PDF, HTML, XML).

2. software and hardware platforms (e.g., storage types).

3. the local and wide area network for delivery (e.g bandwidth, protocols).

Preservation issues, e.g.,how to archive and preserve digital

resources for posterity.

Economic issues, e.g.,1. pricing models for access to electronic

resources.2. competition in traditional publishing.3. different models of delivery through

intermediaries and other third parties.4. rights management.

6.6.Management.Staffing and organisational issues, e.g.,

1. future role of librarians.2. appropriate organisational structure that

will deliver services effectively.

‘Collection development’ or content issues, e.g.,1. selection criteria to be used.2. local hosting versus remote hosting of

digital resources.3. economics of ownership.4. consortium arrangements.5. licensing and intellectual property.6. preservation and archiving.

Resource discovery, e.g.,1. ‘Cataloguing’ the Internet.2. Metadata.3. Future role of the OPAC.4. standards (e.g., metadata).

Service issues, e.g.,1. degree of mediated/unmediated

services.2. quality issues, performance indicators

for electronic services.3. document delivery services.

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4. information literacy programs (how to train and educate users in the ‘virtual’ environment).

5. basic vs value added services (user pays vs free access).

6.7.Access infrastructure.Technological issues, e.g.,

1. hardware and software infrastructure.2. the network infrastructure (standards,

protocols).3. document delivery management

systems.

Policy issues, e.g.,1. ownership of computers by students.2. funding issues (e.g., with respect to

Internet access and document delivery services).

Economic issues, e.g.,1. cost of funding the infrastructure.2. new models for funding the

infrastructure.

Building issues, e.g.,1. need for new library building design,2. ‘information commons,’3. provision of access facilities and

equipment.

The above table contains a number of abbreviations relating to technical concepts. The terms are explained in Webopedia (http://www.webopedia.com/).

Readings:

W.Y. Arms, (1999), Digital Libraries. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000.

W. Cathro (1999), ‘Digital Libraries: A National Perspective’. Paper presented at the Information Online & On Disc Conference, Sydney, 19-21 January 1999, at: http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/cathro4.html).

G. McMillan (2000), ‘The digital library: without a soul can it be a library?’ Keynote address at the VALA 2000 Conference. (http://www.vala.org.au/vala2000/2000pdf/McMillan.PDF).

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7.Three solutions to the isolated library.

7.1.Consortiums ( = consortia).7.2.Gateways.

7.3.Dissolve barriers between virtual institutions.

7.1.Consortiums.

For a very long time, libraries have co-operated for various purposes, including purchase agreements. In the last lecture, Conspectus was described, and in the previous lecture, the concept of the Distributed National Collection. Both involve co-operation.

Reciprocal borrowing agreements have applied to Victorian public and academic libraries for decades. The CAVAL scheme allows students and staff from Victorian universities and TAFE colleges can borrow from other educational libraries. Special libraries also have special arrangements between themselves, for example the LIFE (Librarians in Financial Enterprises) group in Sydney, and Business Librarians group in Melbourne.

At some of these sites you’ll find mention of Consortia arrangement. The State Library of Queensland (http://www.slq.qld.gov.au) mentions the CASL (Council of Australian State Libraries) Consortium (http://www.casl.org.au). Please spend time looking at the list of the products -- http://www.caslconsortium.org/productlist.html. SLQLD also offers quite a number of services to public libraries - http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/publib/.

In the university library sector the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) has been very active in “Consortial Purchasing” on behalf of its members. Look at the CAUL site -- http://www.caul.edu.au/, and then note the activities of CEIRC -- http://www.caul.edu.au/datasets/ceirc.htm. At the CAUL site you will also find information on University Library Australia (ULA), a national university library borrowing scheme, and it’s worthwhile looking at “Other Borrowing Schemes”.

State libraries support consortiums with public libraries to varying degrees. The State Library of NSW (http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au) for instance has always had close links to public libraries in that state. From the State Library’s homepage follow the link under “Services” to public libraries. Look at the information relating to NSW.net (http://www.nswnet.net) and explore the range of databases made available. Also look at Ilanet – a not-for-profit business unit of the SLNSW – http://www.ilanet.net.au.

In South Australia (http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au) the State Library provides public access to a range of databases – some with remote access provided the patron has registered at the State Library. There is also PLAIN (Public Libraries

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Automated Information Network). According to its url (http://www.plain.sa.gov.au), it offers:

Consolidated selection data from a range of independent sources. Integrated access to backlist databases. Fully electronic selection – fast, accurate service at your fingertips. The ability to profile your Library’s selection needs, build customised,

multiple profiles for the PLAIN system to select according to your needs. Sophisticated searching and retrieval of titles for selection and time saving

on-line selection tips (best-sellers, popular authors). Receive electronic catalogue records from PLAIN to upload onto your

library system software.

In Victoria, Victoria's Virtual Library, from the State Library offers more limited support (http://libraries.vic.gov.au/about/).

Reading:

J.Kennedy (2002), Collection management; a concise introduction, ch 7.

7.2.Gateways.

7.2.1.Some recent gateways.

The National Library of Australia assesses collection strength data held in the Australian Libraries Gateway and updated by its owners -- more than 5,000 libraries around Australia (see Debbie Campbell, Manager Infrastructure Projects, Coordination Support Branch, NLA, ‘Australian subject gateways - metadata as an agent of change’ at the VALA 2000 conference, Melbourne, 18 February 2000, at: http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/dcampbell2.html#).

Access and collecting can be treated as part of the same model now. Gateways or portals can cover subjects, formats, or institutions. A subject gateway may be defined as ‘a Web-based mechanism for accessing a collection of high quality, evaluated resources identified to support research in a particular subject discipline where the resources are evaluated and described by information specialists in the field, such as science librarians.’ (Available: www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/sg/).

The earliest began in 1999. Some Australian examples relate to agriculture, chemistry, engineering and information technology: Agrigate, MetaChem, and AVEL (Australian Virtual Engineering Library). Their respective hosts are the University of Melbourne, the Australian Defence Force Academy for the University of New South Wales, and the University of Queensland.

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7.2.2.Common gateway features.

7.2.2.1.The host institutions of each gateway have a mandate to be information providers, but they are not required to be information creators.

All except EdNA Online (which is managed by a private company, Education.Au) are hosted in Australia by university libraries. But the Education Network of Australia has an even stronger link to the education community: it is funded by all of Australia's State and Commonwealth Departments of Education.

7.2.2.2.Each gateway has a distinctive logo and a reflective name, thereby positioning it for a significant Web presence.

Distinctive branding also bears fruit as a common recognition technique.7.2.2.3.Each gateway has selected and utilised a standard metadata schema for describing the resources incorporated into the gateways.

The metadata is applied by librarians or educators with experienced knowledge of the disciplines. (If you are not familiar with metadata, look for a description of it at: http://www.website2go.com/p78.html).

7.2.2.4.The resources in each gateway have all been selected according to pre-determined criteria,

published at each gateway site as part of a content coverage policy. A gatekeeper function, often a mix of computer and human intervention, ensures adherence to the selection criteria. The currently free access means that the gateway may be used by any member of the public with an interest in the discipline.

7.2.2.5.The coverage policies have made electronic resources, both 'born digital' and digitised, the highest priority for inclusion in the gateways;

but they are all extensible to include books as well as bytes, and under-utilised or unknown resources such as databases, and descriptions of people.

7.2.2.6.The resources are supported by similar architectures, based on distributed creation and maintenance of their metadata, with a centralised facility for access. The metadata, if embedded in resources prior to their selection, may be enhanced or merely augmented but not ignored. The access facility, a navigation interface which provides for the metadata to be queried transparently or explicitly, is provided in at least one of three forms -- keyword searching, index browsing, or structured pathways.

7.2.2.7.The navigation points are usually supported by the use of at least one thesaurus,

to ensure reliability of resource description and subsequent search results. For example, Agrigate uses CABI and its Australian extensions, Agterms, as managed by the Kondinin Group in Western Australia.

7.3.Dissolve barriers between virtual institutions.

In some instances, the differentiation between libraries and other cultural institutions is becoming blurred, partly because of the power of networked

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techonologies. Thus some museums are uploading their collections to three-dimensional virtual space. See for example: Collections Australia Network, athttp://www.collectionsaustralia.net/, to co-ordinate museums around the country, including their collection policies.

The Victorian Virtual Library at http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/ provides connections between a remarkable variety of cultural institutions, including The Age newspaper, the Emerging Writers Festival, Express Media, the Victorian Premier's Reading Challenge, open to all Victorian students from Year 3 to Year 9, the 2nd Library Books for East Timor, the Local History Digitisation Project, Picture Australia, the Victoria Visualised Report, Virtual Library Infonet, Capture Your Collections (a digitisation course for small museums), Cornell University Library, Department of Preservation and Conservation, Ithaca, New York, National Library of Australia’s Australia's Web resources: guidelines for creators and publishers, overseas digitization projects, and groups interested in Local Studies and Local History in Victorian libraries. One might well ask where the local library interests begin and end.

7.4.AARLIN (http://www.aarlin.edu.au/).

The Australian Academic and Research Library Network project (AARLIN), supported by the Australian Research Council and the Department of Education, Science and Training, is an excellent example of a gateway, a collaboration of twelve Australian universities and the National Library of Australia. Its principal aim is to develop a structure and framework for providing unmediated, personalized and seamless end user access to the analogue and digital resources of Australian university and research libraries from workstations of research staff and students.

The proposal to develop AARLIN emerged from a specially convened meeting of the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) in 1999. Academic libraries were experiencing difficulties in meeting the needs and demands of the scholarly community, particularly in regard to the information infrastructure to support research and teaching informed by research. These concerns were shared by all Australian universities and were raised in a number of public forums on the 'crisis' in scholarly communication. Independent reviews of the national information infrastructure confirmed the parlous state of disrepair, the consequences of which had serious long-term difficulties for the national knowledge base. The problems had become global in fact.

In broad terms the CAUL group set out to research and develop an architecture using portal technologies, which would integrate the various library resource sharing services so that users would have an integrated view of the information resources available in collaborating libraries. Importantly, the portal would be able to provide access to information in a range of formats. Several universities agreed to become test sites to trial the AARLIN prototype, and most are now rolling it out.

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The AARLIN service model is based on a consortium model for resource sharing and utilises software that supports multiple institutions rather than a single institution. Collaboration includes commitment and investment of resources, based on a shared vision. Institutions no longer have complete autonomy to do what they like in terms of information delivery to researchers, and where their services are intricately intertwined.

AARLIN uses portal technology with a common user interface to provide a whole host of services for researchers, including:

accessing a uniform search interface which will permit distributed searching of multiple electronic databases, websites, online library catalogues and other electronic information resources using a single search syntax;

populating a web-based form with appropriate metadata and generating a document delivery request, if required;

accessing a range of appropriate or extended services (including deep linking to full-text where available) using context sensitive reference software via the OpenURL framework;

pushing to researchers the relevant 'information landscape' or suite of information resources as determined by their authenticated user profile;

permitting users to personalise and refine their search 'environment' making it possible for them to suppress or expand the 'information landscape' pushed to them as a default;

allowing users to receive literature alerts informing them of newly available material matching their specified search profile on a regular basis.

AARLIN can incorporate a number of additional features, although these are not within the scope of the current project. These include:

Integration with university-wide portals. Integration with e-learning systems like WebCT and Blackboard. Distributed searching of learning objects repositories or open archive

systems (including e-print). Chat, e-mail, interactive and video conferencing facilities (to provide

human interaction). Web delivery of documents. Shopping cart for selection of services/documents. Secure payments (user pays). Rights management (to compensate publishers). Provision of 24x7 collaborative reference and help services on a national

scale.

A distributed model allows AARLIN management to locate servers in the various states, thus solving some of the problems relating to the cost of Internet traffic. At the same time, it permits AARLIN to make use of cheaper hardware, to provide a

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failsafe solution through the use of mirror servers, and to incrementally increase the number of servers as the need arises without suffering a cost blowout.

The framework to facilitate the implementation of library portals across participant academic libraries throughout Australia is:

To roll out portal software: review available software, and then purchase, install and co-ordinate the configuration and maintenance of that software, engendering the involvement of staff from participant University libraries in the shared benefits of collaboration.

To develop an administrative structure that ensures cost-efficiencies and sustainability of the AARLIN system.

To create a legal framework that will encompass issues such as copyright, and intellectual property; and development streams such as e-commerce.

To devise and implement a business plan.

Libraries have been evolving for centuries. In the days when books were in closed stacks, users relied on library staff to fetch the books for them. The library operated like a retail shop, where all the articles of value were kept under lock and key or behind the counter, and delivered directly to the customer by the retailer. Libraries then moved into the era of open access or open stacks, where users could browse in the stacks, select the book or books that they wanted to read, and then check them out at the loans counter. This is the supermarket or self-service model, and it is this model that libraries continue to use today. However, this is a stand-alone model and does not promote collaboration easily. To remain relevant libraries have to develop a new collaborative model for providing services, using e-commerce and portal technologies. The products that libraries deal with -- information products like electronic documents and digital objects -- easily make use of e-commerce tools.

Readings:

Earle Gow (2004), ‘AARLIN: an Australian approach to managing e-collection access’, in Library Management in Changing Environment; IATUL Proceedings, Vol. 14 (New Series) 2004, May 30 - June 3, 2004, in Kraków, Poland, at: http://www.iatul.org/conference/proceedings/vol14/papers_by_sessions.html.

B. Hawkins (2000), 'Libraries, Knowledge Management, and Higher Education in an Electronic Environment'. Keynote address, presented at ALIA 2000: capitalising on knowledge, the information profession in the 21st century, 24-26 October 2000, at:http://www.alia.org.au/conferences/alia2000/proceedings/.

S. Huggard, et al. (2002), 'Monash Library Database Usage Survey'. In: VALA 11th Biennial Conference and Exhibition:e-volving Information Futures, 6-8 Feb 2002. Melbourne: VALA, pp 313 - 342.

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Edward H T Lim, Earle Gow, ‘A new model for collaborative library service: the AARLIN project’, at Information online 11th conference 2003, at:http://conferences.alia.org.au/online2003/papers/limgow.html.

Graeme Johanson, 15 May 2005.

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