National Round Table on Access to Overseas Monographs Through Australian Libraries
28 August 1998, National Library of Australia
ACCESS TO OVERSEAS MONOGRAPHS
Madeline McPherson
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Introduction
The title of this Roundtable is specifically concerned with Overseas monographs. But 75% of the monograph acquisitions at my University are non-Australian imprints and the distinction seems to me to reflect the national perspective rather than the day to day difficulties faced by libraries in meeting the needs of their users. There is nothing wrong with taking a national perspective and I recognise that the decline in the proportion of overseas imprints being collected by Australian libraries in toto justifies concern about the quality of support libraries can give to research and scholarship in Australia. I appreciate that cooperative collection development through the designation of recognised subject speciality libraries could increase the coverage of titles on a national basis, and that this might be important if interlending or other access cannot be arranged with overseas organisations. However I suggest that in terms of the measures we might contemplate to identify a wanted item and get it to the user, it makes no practical difference where a book is published. In this paper, which is concerned with access mechanisms, I intend simply to speak of monographs in general.
When I talk to one of these Roundtables, where the focus intentionally is on supporting research and scholarship, I like to take a few minutes to describe the university I come from.
USQ is a post-Dawkins university, created in 1992 from a former CAE with a strong involvement in distance education, which was then still exclusively undergraduate education. This inheritance, and the experience that came from it, is now seen as fortunate. Flexible delivery is the current buzzword in higher education. The drivers of pedagogical change are the needs of an information economy for lifelong learning in the workforce, the impossibility in practical and financial terms of providing such continuing education on campus for everyone requiring it, and the happy if challenging conjunction of these factors with the development of technologies which seem to facilitate off-campus learning.
With our existing involvement in distance education it has been easier for USQ than most to start reconceptualising not just teaching and learning, but also the support services that will be required in the new environment. This I imagine is my qualification as a speaker at this Roundtable, to the extent that it is concerned with looking forward to new, even radical, forms of practice.
Our Clients
My justification for taking your time with this introduction is that the practical problems of getting documentary information to users when they need it is not all that different whoever the users are, and whatever uses they make of the information supplied. I do come to this paper with the particular perspective of USQ. However it is likely that to the extent that the older universities follow the fashion for flexible learning, they will come to share many of our current challenges. As well all universities have the ongoing challenge of supporting high level research though at USQ we have to support fewer disciplines than a sandstone library. But whether or not the student body changes, all libraries will find I think that their users increasingly expect information to be delivered to them where they work, and in such a form and within such a timeframe that it can be integrated into their workflow as needed.
In the light of this introduction you will not be surprised that I have taken my text from the final key issue identified by the focus group of ILL librarians convened by the NLA as part of the preparation for this Roundtable, (and I quote): The growth of distance education in Australia has ramifications for the Australian ILL system because of the nature of distance education users and their needs. I think this is true. I disagree however with the inference, if it was being made, that the demands these students will make are so very different from those we already face.
What is the nature of these students, and what are their needs? Increasingly they are postgraduate students, not usually research students though they may do some research. Such students are undertaking further study after a first degree, often study with career application. They are mature age students, often quite mature, in their thirties, forties or older. They are truly undertaking lifelong learning. The level of their study however may not be what we might have once considered postgraduate and their course is often composed largely of units at the undergraduate level. This means that, like traditional undergraduates, they have short timelines, they cannot wait weeks for a book to be delivered for an assignment. These degrees are not new, the professional library qualification I did at the University of New South Wales back in the mists of time was just such a degree.
However the proliferation of such degrees makes increasingly meaningless the distinctions between undergraduate and postgraduate students on which many of our rules about access to interlibrary loans have been based. Unless we redefine those rules in line with something like the DEETYA definition of a research degree, we are entering into obligations to students which the current systems for document delivery make it very difficult to meet. I for one do not think this is an appropriate time to be making access to services more restrictive.
I myself teach some of these students, a unit called, funnily enough "Issues in Publishing and Technology" which is offered through the Internet to students seeking a "postgraduate" qualification in traditional editing and publishing, or in multimedia communication. My students are in the US and the UK, Hong Kong and Dubai, as well as across Australia, but at the moment the USQ Library does not offer conventional library services outside Australia, though students are able to access our online resources, licence provisions permitting.
Electronic Alternatives
My students, like most of us, have varying views of the ability of new technologies to offer solutions to the logistical problems we face in getting information to users, whether as articles or books. It is noticeable that the students who come from the Multimedia stream are much more willing to contemplate the prospect of electronic books than those from the Editing and Publishing stream. I was interested that 78% of respondents to the questionnaire from the National Academies Forum did not think that the electronic provision of monographs would be a satisfactory alternative to printed works.
Generation gaps aside, resistance to the idea of electronic books is based on comfort, aesthetic, and readability considerations. There is no doubt that electronic books, as opposed to documents about the size of a journal article, will not be acceptable until a device is produced that is easy to read, easy to carry, comfortable to use, and can produce graphic material with at least the clarity of good printed colour plates. If they are really to replace the experience of reading a printed book, such devices will need better lightweight battery technology. I am pretty sure that such a device is not far off. There are fairly regular reports in the technical press about new developments towards the goal, the most recent being received this week. The item reads:
PALM BOOKS FROM PEANUTS
Electronic publisher Peanut Press will begin this fall delivering books
electronically to owners of 3Com Palm Pilot computing devices. Peanut has
established relationships with major publishers and says that once a book
has been selected, it can be encrypted and downloaded from the Web in
about a minute using a 28.8 modem. (Information Week 17 Aug 1998).
Now Im not attracted to the idea of reading a book on a Palm Pilot, but this news item does highlight for me something we have to think about if the books our clients request are to be electronically available when an acceptable device does come on the market. We should be keeping an eye on these developments and taking the initiative to negotiate with copyright holders so that out-of-print books can be provided in this format, or be lobbying for copyright regimes that allow us to obtain digital copies from library holdings. Otherwise the only Palm Pilot compatible books will be Jackie Collins, Stephen King, or the latest self-help best seller.
Printing on Demand
There are ways of delivering copies of monographs that rely on digital storage and communications but result in a conventional printed product that asks less adjustment from readers. Digital copies of books can be downloaded from distant servers and printed on demand. I am pretty sure that in the not too distant future campus bookshops for example, or alternatively campus libraries, will be set up to print texts on-demand, through arrangements with publishers. Many of these books will be customised to the requirements of the lecturer or student and resemble the books of readings that are supplied to most distance students today.
Such arrangements would solve the problems currently experienced with timely delivery of texts (ie, in time for semester) and eliminate the considerable distribution costs of traditional printed volumes. They will also cut the losses to bookshop or publisher that result from overestimation of demand for a text that may have no sale value past a single semester. Such miscalculations drive up costs overall. Distribution costs of print-on-demand books would be minimised if we all undertook to be agents for one anothers distance students, who could then be supplied from the nearest campus facility.
There is an obvious business in this for publishers who will receive income from every copy made. We are perhaps more concerned at todays seminar about texts for which there is no great commercial market, or whose identified market was misjudged. One example of the latter is a direct result of the shrinking in library budgets and the increasing reluctance of publishers to carry the costs of substantial backlists.
The consequence of the shrinking backlists is that libraries often do not have the funds available to order all the requested titles on publication and by the time the library does make a title a priority it is often out of print. This window of opportunity to order a title seems to be getting shorter and shorter, though I must confess I rely here on anecdotal evidence from acquisitions librarians rather than research data.
Given the technology we already have within reach, this is a frustrating situation. The book is presumably sitting somewhere in digital form in the publishers files. It certainly existed at some stage in a digital file. Perhaps the library community should begin serious negotiations with publishers for recognition of and suitable financial arrangements for the secondary market that those digital files represent.
I have been talking so far about printing on demand as close as possible to the requesting user/library. I have come recently on another example. Xlibris (http://www.xlibris.com) is admittedly what we might call a vanity publisher but one with a difference. It offers authors the ability to edit and design their own books online, and it publishes them in high quality hardback editions in printing runs of as few as one. It promises its authors that their books will never go out of print. If a vanity publisher can do it, why not a commercial publisher? The overheads are nothing like keeping backlists in print. I believe the Harvard Business School already uses printing on demand for publication of its case studies. (Nunberg)
We are still left with the problem of old books, those for which there is no digital file. The economics of making a digital copy from printed pages are however changing. According to Nunberg in a book called Future Libraries published in 1995 "In the current state of the art, it costs around fifty dollars (US) to hand-scan a 300 page book.....additional bound copies can be produced for less than ten dollars." The cost of scanning depends on the clarity of the original of course.
These are some of the developments that may help us in the future. Back to solutions that are within our grasp.
Developments in Document Delivery
Through membership of the management committee for the NP(R)F funds that were committed for information infrastructure I have been associated with both the JEDDS and the CILLA/LIDDAS projects. I dont want to go into much detail about the systems as such here. They are both concerned with improving document delivery systems and those with an interest will presumably have followed their progress. Briefly, JEDDS is concerned with using tcp/ip communications systems, the mother system of which is the Internet, to deliver scanned documents as email attachments to the desktop of the requester.
The second project is about managing interlibrary loan/document delivery services. It was designed to automate traditional interlibrary loan operations and provide for integration of local and national systems. The NLA and the AVCC jointly developed specifications and initially went jointly out to tender, though subsequently each contracted separately with the same vendor for development of the separate, ie. central and local, management systems.
In universities traditional ILL means services to academics and postgraduate students. USQ is not a strong research university and our interlibrary loan traffic is relatively small, so you may find it surprising that we are among the first to take up the system, which is not cheap. However it seemed to me that it opened up possibilities for serving our distance students, who are two thirds of our clients, much more effectively. Of course I am also concerned about the quality of the service we can offer our academic staff, but distance students are a greater challenge. Here is my vision for that service.
The Vision
I want to be able to offer our users a web based interface which will give them access to our catalogue, to the catalogues of as many other Australian libraries as possible, and access also to the commercial electronic databases to which we subscribe. I want them to be able to search all these sources with a single search statement and to be delivered results organised in such a way that they are able from a subsequent screen to order an item - article or book - from the source which is cheapest to the USQ Library and most convenient or fastest for them. This will require a system that can apply an appropriate algorithm that takes into account the needs and location of the student, the policies and costs of the potential suppliers, any copyright costs and considerations, and the financial and administrative policies of USQ that govern these transactions. Because it was conceived as serving the traditional ILL market, LIDDAS software as presently envisaged does not offer a function to prioritise suppliers according to postcode, so that it could read the postcode of the requesting student and prefer a supplier library in their state. This will have to wait on further enhancements, which will themselves be dependent on other libraries using the system as we intend to do. However the remaining functionality should be available.
I want to get the item to the requester quickly. At present it is possible for one of my students who lives in Perth to need a book on say electronic publishing, while at the same time an Edith Cowen student of librarianship living in Charleville asks for the same book to be sent from Perth. From the point of view of the system as a whole this seems crazy. I want the student to be able to have the item ordered delivered directly to them, either as a scanned file direct to their desktop, or in the case of a book to the address they nominate, from the nearest library. In the case of a book, I want it supplied ideally within a few days, or at least within a week. I would want all details of the transaction logged by the system at USQ for our housekeeping purposes. I want the student to be able to put the book into a postage-paid return package for prompt return to the lending library. This delivery part of the vision will require the USQ Library to have made agreements, either bilaterally or preferably on a sector-wide basis, for supply of books from other libraries directly to USQ students, and for there to be an agreed fee for such a service. It will be up to the home institution to decide who ultimately pays that fee. What I would also like to see negotiated is a national contract with a courier or postal service, similar to the arrangement Ohiolink has with, I think, Pony Express.
My expectation is that LIDDAS, in conjunction with other systems, will make it possible for such a vision to be realised, if libraries are able to negotiate mutually agreeable arrangements to provide services to the clients of other universities.
I have described the system as it will serve distance students. It can as well serve academic staff more efficiently because, if the system operates as envisaged, there will be no reason why books cannot be delivered directly to academic offices or homes, bypassing the procedures that are at present performed in interlibrary loan departments. This vision bears a strong resemblance to a description of the Janus Initiative being developed by the AVCC, CSIRO, the National Library, the Academies, CAUDIT and CAUL and I quote "The ultimate aim is for the researcher to obtain all their information from the desk; a number of sub-systems may be required. Ideally, a researcher should be able to consider all libraries as their own, and obtain information directly from them rather than via a third party." (Report of meeting of Janus Cooperative Information Centres, Steering Group Meeting 1, 22 June 1998)
To sum up, this is the functionality Im looking for to help my library supply monographs to users, if we are to achieve this ideal:
- Users are able to identify and locate monographs - either through applications of Z39.50 or by direct access to a user-friendly interface to the NBD
- Users are able to determine the availability of an item (loan restrictions, whether an item is on the shelves), and the cost of ordering it
- Users are able to order an item to be delivered directly to them
- Users are able to return the item directly to the lending library at no further cost, ie. the cost quoted is inclusive of return postage
- Loans traffic and costs are managed according to the policies of the home institution
What We Can Do
What do libraries need to do to make this possible?
- We must cooperate to make catalogues available via a shared system that is end-user friendly
- We must negotiate an agreed financial basis for the supply of monographs on loan direct to users.
- We must negotiate, as a consortium, with a postal or courier service to deliver loans to users. The contract must include return delivery.
These requirements would I think deliver a more comprehensive solution to the problem of access, and perhaps a more radical one, than those envisaged in the draft resolutions. They dont seem to me to be any more difficult to achieve, if we are prepared to try.
Madeleine McPherson
27 August 1998
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Nunberg, Geoffrey 1995 The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction in Future Libraries ed. R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse. University of California Press, Berkeley pp 13-37