I must say that when I was told I had twenty minutes to address this topic I thought it was a big ask. I notice that previous speakers in this session have chosen to talk about possible solutions rather than difficulties, although Lynne Brindley has certainly presented a challenge to Australia with her report on the JISC projects in the UK. I'm afraid I'm going to be more downbeat.
I come from an institution which has been a university for less than five years. Research, as I understand it in universities, is in its infancy, and the university Library can certainly not claim to have the resources to support research on any scale.
Two thirds of our students study by distance education, mostly in Australia, but, numbered in thousands, also in about 40 other countries principally in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the Middle East. We don't even attempt to give library support to offshore students. What we can do for our onshore students is constrained by the limitations of the communications systems available - telephone, fax, and of course the post. Relatively few students as yet have Internet access though all our planning seeks to take advantage of that facility whenever possible.
The University of Southern Queensland believes it has an edge in experience, organisation and expertise over most others in the move to flexible delivery of courses. Maintaining that edge is a corporate objective, but we cannot do it alone, no university can. We therefore believe that partnerships with others will be important to our future.
In preparing to address the specifics of this session, I asked someone on my staff what she saw as our greatest challenge and she of course said “money”. Now I could talk about money for twenty minutes, or I could be more sophisticated and talk about money for ten minutes and copyright for another ten, and if I did that I think most of my colleagues would think I had my priorities about right. But I suspect it would be to no effect.
So let me put the challenges in another couple of capsules - technology and human behaviour. As I know there are a lot of people here better qualified than I am to talk about technology, I'll only make a few points about that and spend most of my time on human behaviour.
The first point I'd make about technology is that it is a necessary but not sufficient part of the solution to our difficulties. There is a danger of our being overly fascinated by the technology itself -a not uncommon phenomenon with new technologies. It took the airlines fifty years to decide that they were not in the aeroplane business but in the travel and hospitality business - and they still haven't figured out how to serve a meal at 30,000 feet that you'd want to eat for any reason except that it helps to pass the time.
It's particularly dangerous if funding authorities, especially governments, become overly fascinated with the technology. It's said that if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. The problems of university libraries are large and complex, but one sometimes gets the impression that governments see technology as the hammer with which to knock them all down.
However it is true that technical infrastructure built and maintained to capacity is an essential part of the solution. And not just campus infrastructure, or the dedicated, high-performance academic network. We also need public infrastructure, or at least my university does if it is to serve all its students well. The student Back of Bourke, beyond the reach of the commercially viable market for cable TV, also needs something better than twisted copper pair if the technology is to do much for them.
We also need the standards and protocols that will enable resource sharing and the efficient, effective management of large information databases, and the migration of digitally stored information from one format to another as the technology develops. Failure to develop or adopt these will mean wastage of resources on short-term solutions.
In other words, we need more investment, and a more mature technology.
Now a question: If the technology was mature, if we had:
If all this was available, and if we were designing mechanisms for scholarly communication, would we design an industry that looks like the scholarly journal industry we have today?
Certainly I wouldn't. As a librarian I'm too conscious of all the costs associated with the maintenance of hard copy collections:
I also know that, in any particular library, a significant proportion of this expensive resource is never used. This is not to say that all the articles in their costly array are not consulted at some time by someone somewhere in the world, but that for any particular group of users many are irrelevant. There is a large measure of redundancy in the present system.
And now to human behaviour. Animal behaviour is studied by observation, perhaps because animals can't fill out questionnaires. I have to confess that I've relied on this rather primitive methodology for the following remarks about humans, but the observations have been made over 25 years working in academic libraries.
I observe how people use our resources. Some academics regularly visit the new periodicals display, scan the contents lists of journals in their field, and copy any articles of interest. This might be called the first life of a journal article.
In the second life, post-publication, people who are bibliographically literate consult the volumes only for a particular article identified by a citation or reference from elsewhere - an index, a bibliography, a personal recommendation. The only people who scan the whole of past issues in libraries are the students who didn't attend their library skills classes, and know no better.
Something else I observe is that, at least at this second stage, academics seem perfectly happy, in fact delighted, if the article can be delivered to them electronically. Most are quite satisfied, even prefer, a copy printed off at their workstation, especially if it saves a visit to the library.
So - and this is not an original thought - it seems that hard copy scholarly journal publishing serves the authors better than it serves the readers.
It's no coincidence I think that the rate of relative decline of library collecting dates from the seventies and eighties. That's when the ability of libraries to maintain their purchasing rate relative to total academic publishing began to decline. If one assumes that the rate of scholarly publishing bears at least some relation to the rate of creation of new knowledge, the concern that has been expressed about this situation is well justified.
I'm not here to challenge the correlation between publishing volume and the creation of knowledge. (Although sometimes, and in some fields more than others, one wonders how much is really new and how much is creative recycling.) However I make the following observation.
This period of explosion of academic publishing cooincided with rapid growth in the academic workforce. Of course we have an immaculate connection here: more academics equals more research which hopefully leads to more new knowledge. But given the academic reward system, to what extent is this outpouring fuelled by the need and desire to make careers (perfectly legitimate and understandable) and to what extent is it driven by the “Eureka!” phenomenon? If the only way an academic could communicate the results of their research was by leaping out of the bath and running naked through the streets, would they be more modest in their behaviour?
If academics were not driven by `publish on paper or perish', would they prefer other communications behaviours - personal contact, conferencing, actual or virtual, discussion lists and would they save print for more magisterial, comprehensive works?
Professor Fender showed us a fascinating graph this morning which demonstrated how, with the incentive of a new research assessment exercise, the rate of journal publishing by researchers rose substantially in the UK while declining or remaining static elsewhere. Which seems to confirm that academic publishing behaviour is strongly influenced by the reward system.
Career ambitions are not the only reason why there is a preference for publishing on paper. It is seen to be a substantial and lasting medium. I suspect that every author likes the idea that, in libraries around the world, their words are preserved on a page for the future. They gain by publishing thus, if not the certainty of immortality at least the hope of it.
So if we librarians believe that we could more efficiently, i.e., at less cost and with as good or better effect, serve our users if the academic world moved to electronic publishing, then the authors need to be persuaded that
A change from print to electronic may not greatly lower the initial costs of publishing. Costs associated with quality control - peer review - and marketing will still be incurred. What will be saved are the very considerable costs to libraries of the second, half-life, of the journal. The redundant, repititious and second rate will continue to appear but the costs of continuing preservation and access which currently fall on libraries will fall dramatically. It puzzles me that publishers seem to have so little understanding of these library costs, and have been so reluctant to take advantage of the market opportunity to reduce them.
I've argued that the traditional academic publishing industry serves the authors better than the readers. There may be good moral reasons for this - the author creates the content - and, in the past, practical reasons to do with the nature of the publishing and distribution process for print-on-paper. But if the reliance on print continues after the maturing of electronic publishing technology then it will be a pretty funny industry - one where the product is designed for and meets the needs of the producers, not the consumers, not those who pay (the libraries), or those who use the product (the readers).
But then scholarly publishing always has been a funny industry, where the normal economic laws of supply and demand and price seem to have no application.
Lest you infer from the above that I am an uncritical technophile, let me set your mind at rest. It is certainly true that I believe technology offers the best hope for serving many of the clients of my library - the researchers and the distance students. But it will be a long time before the virtual library can offer all the advantages of access to a large traditional collection. The Association of American UniversitiesResearch Libraries Project for example estimated that by the year 2015 only 20% of scientific and medical literature is likely to be available in digital form, chiefly because it is only current publishing that is likely to be comprehensively digitised (1). A virtual library will not offer its users the pleasures and benefits of serendipitous browsing, a behaviour of library users that librarians may sniff at, but which is very popular. Hypertext offers a facility that is in some ways comparable, but the efficicacy of hypertext wandering is dependent, as physical browsing is, on the richness of the total resource and, as the AAU calculation suggests, it will be a long time before the digital environment has the historical richness of the print library. `Comprehensive searching' is a description of the capabilities of a search engine, not, at the moment, of the potential of the environment. And finally, “just-in-time” information provision requires the user to be able to identify clearly what it is they need. As we well know, many of our users have to begin much further back in the information search than the specific reference.
The challenges of supplying information support are large in any university today. In mine they are huge. We simply haven't had the time, and almost certainly will never have the money, to collect printed resources to support research. As far as teaching and learning goes, we cannot serve most of our students as we would like and as they need, chiefly because communications infrastructure is inadequate and because the present copyright law would in any case severly limit what we might be able to supply them. But these are not problems peculiar to USQ, and the solutions will not be ours alone. I'm hoping I can go from this conference believing that the problems that face us all are better understood, and that solutions are closer.
References:
1. Association of American Universities Research Libraries Project. Reports of the AAU Task Forces. Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1994. (Quoted in: Towards a new paradigm for scholarly communication. Discussion paper prepared by the AUCC-CARL/ABRC Task Force on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication. http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/documents/schloarly(aucc-carl).html
[This paper was delivered at the National Scholarly Communications Forum Roundtable No. 5, Canberra, 21-22 October, 1996]