Staff Papers
Managing Chaos in the Cyberworld
A paper presented by Margaret E Phillips, Manager Australian Electronic Unit, at CONSAL 2000, the 11th Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians Conference, Singapore, 26th - 28th April 2000
CONTENTS
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Strategy 1. Facilitating access to online information
- Strategy 2. Ensuring long term access to online publications
- Strategy 3. Describing and Persistently Identifying Online Publications
- Strategy 4. Managing the Organisational Issues
- Strategy 5. Managing the Legal Issues
- Strategy 6. Cooperating and Collaborating
- Conclusion
- About the Speaker
Abstract
This paper examines the chaotic aspects of the cyberworld, addresses the issues they raise for libraries and librarians and refers to projects and initiatives already in place which are contributing, not only to a more orderly cyberworld, but to a dynamic one.
Introduction
'Chaos' is a wonderfully evocative word, a " 'formless void of primordial matter', the 'great deep' or 'abyss' out of which the cosmos or order of the universe was evolved". Can you think of anything that could be better calculated to set the creative energies of librarians going than the challenge of forming order from the chaos of the cyberworld?
A challenge it certainly is. We have responded to it and made remarkable progress in the last five years, but much remains to be done. It is only a couple of years since one frequently read that librarians and libraries were redundant, that the Internet held all our information needs. That opinion is not encountered as often now. There is recognition I believe that, in the cyberworld, information professionals are more relevant than ever before, and their demonstrated ability to build meaningful form within the void is being increasingly valued.
The experiences that I am drawing on in presenting this paper are those of a librarian at the National Library of Australia with the task of ensuring long term access to Australian Internet publications.
The National Library of Australia established the PANDORA Project in 1996 to address the need to collect and preserve Australian Internet publications. The acronym encapsulates our vision - Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia. One of the most important lessons we have learned from this Project is - Take Small Steps. Initially it was very hard to know how to break through the chaos barrier. Where could we begin? By taking one first small step - developing selection guidelines for what we would want to collect and preserve, if only we could find the wherewithal to do so - we started on a long steep learning curve.
From this unsteady start, many small steep steps later, we have
- an operational, publicly-accessible archive;
- staff who are experienced in the theoretical as well as the practical aspects of archiving online publications;
- detailed specifications for the technical infrastructure needed to carry the operation forward into the future;
- a strategy in place for achieving it;
- management of online publications integrated into the everyday business of the Library.
This is just one of very many initiatives taken by libraries around the world to create some order out of the chaos of the cyberworld. While some of the early initiatives were reactive, many more are now pro-active. Libraries have seen the World Wide Web's potential for offering new services to clients in a way that was never possible in the print world. So while it has been tremendously challenging for libraries to cope with, they have made some wonderful opportunities.
What is it about the cyberworld that makes us feel that it is so chaotic? The sheer volume of material? The lack of quality assurance we have been used to in the print world? The uncertainly about the authority of documents? Is it not knowing what is out there? The unmanageable number of 'hits' when we do a search? The broken links? Or the difficulty of citing Web publications? Perhaps it is the ephemeral nature of Web resources - here today, but changed or gone tomorrow? Or is it the dilemma for librarians of trying to keep up with both the cyber and the print worlds and attempting to provide the best of both for their patrons. Perhaps it is the fast changing software and hardware that demand continual upgrade to equipment, software, and expertise to continue effective access? Most probably it is many or all of these things.
Although the first and last factors are largely beyond the control of anyone at all, there are a range of solutions under development for the others. In fact, I suggest that some of these solutions already demonstrate that, far from being chaotic and unmanageable, the cyberworld presents us with enormous potential for re-organising and enhancing traditional information services, as well as offering completely new ones.
During the remainder of this paper, I shall address these chaos factors, some of the issues they raise for us, and refer to just some of the many, many projects and initiatives already in place which are contributing, not only to a more orderly cyberworld, but to a dynamic one.
I have grouped these projects and initiatives under the following six broad strategies:
- Facilitating access to online information;
- Ensuring long term access to online publications;
- Describing and identifying online publications;
- Managing the organisational issues;
- Managing the legal issues;
- Cooperating and collaborating.
Strategy 1. Facilitating access to online information
Chaos factors addressed
- Huge volume of material - what is out there?
- Unmanageable number of 'hits' when we search
- Lack of quality assurance
- Uncertainty about authority of publications
Libraries have long played a significant role in organising human knowledge and making it readily accessible. When the Web first emerged, there was the perception in some quarters that all the information that anyone could ever need was now at our fingertips. For a little while, the dazzling new technology seemed to make the laborious and unexciting skills of the librarian redundant. One only needed to key the search terms into a search engine and links to all the information required would be displayed. Enthusiasm for this cornucopia soured quickly when hundreds, even thousands, of hits were presented, most of them irrelevant. Librarians soon realised that the need of their patrons for guidance with electronic information resources was as great, if not greater, than it ever had been in the print world. Researchers have also seen a strong role for libraries and their services.
A study of scientists' changing patterns of communication and their need for library or information intermediary services concluded that there is a significant need by scientists in the natural sciences for electronic collections and service to enable efficient and effective access to print and electronic information through an integrated service.
The skills of librarians and libraries in selecting collections, recording descriptions and enabling access to the descriptions and materials themselves was seen as fundamental to the success of information management in an electronic world.
As we all know, in the traditional library, to provide information services the library acquires a collection of information resources and stores this within the library building. While it may supplement this collection through interlibrary loan, the key concept in most traditional libraries is ownership of information resources.
In the cyberworld, however, information resources are often made available, not by having the items physically within the library, but by linking to them on servers external to the library. This is the concept of the 'virtual collection'. Access to relevant, quality resources is as important in the cyberworld as it is in the print world, and librarians still devote much care and effort to selecting quality sources. Subject guides and subject gateways are strategies for developing virtual collections.
Subject Guides
The plethora of resources available means that the effort required to select the best and to keep the guides up to date is considerable. Because of this, it is common to find libraries and other organisations cooperating to share the cost and effort of building services. For instance, in Australia, the National, state and territory libraries have agreed to form work groups to develop and maintain subject guides that they have in common on subjects such as Australian history, literature, and genealogy. This will enable the sharing of subject expertise and knowledge of collections.
The Pathfinder component of Online Computer Library Center's (OCLC) Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) Project is an initiative that is providing a tool to build subject guides on a much larger scale.
Pathfinders, as subject guides, are Web pages that consolidate links to selected electronic resources on a topic, enabling library staff to develop Web-based subject bibliographies and to provide direct access to the resources. They combine links to Web resources with information available in the local library, such as CD-ROM databases and paper copy reference works. The National Library of Australia's experience in working with Pathfinders suggests there are still considerable technical, workflow and functionality issues to be addressed before the tool is fully effective. Nevertheless, this initiative promises to make an important contribution to the development of digital library infrastructure.
Subject Gateways
Subject gateways are a 'Web-based mechanism for accessing a collection of high quality, evaluated resources identified to support research in a particular subject discipline.'
Of key importance to the concept of the subject gateway is the selection process to ensure a high level of quality and relevance to the subject matter. In the Australian context is has been agreed that the metadata describing the resources in the gateway must meet an international or national standard for resource discovery. These could include the Dublin Core, the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) metadata schema, the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS), or USMARC.
The National Library of Australia has taken a coordinating role in the development of Australian subject gateways, which draw together resources that may be uniquely Australian or of high use value within Australia. It has developed a core set of content, business, and functional characteristics to stimulate further debate on the coherent development of gateways, and to provide Australian gateways with a common framework for participating in the cooperative development of overseas gateways.
- Contributions to the gateway must be made by a range of partnered organisations and institutions, not a single business entity.
- The gateway should address the responsibility of long-term access to content by taking on a management and preservation role for the Australian resources within its purview, or by supporting national initiatives, which aim to do so.
- The selection criteria used to identify resources, and the metadata schema used to describe them, should be made publicly accessible.
- The Web access component of the gateway must support a link to the actual content of a resource or its digital surrogate.
A well-known European subject gateway project is DESIRE, which aims to build large scale information networks for the research community. The key objectives of Phase II of DESIRE are to deliver within its two-year time frame:
- tools ready for exploitation by the European academic community for the development of indexes and catalogues of networked information;
- services built on these tools which allow researchers to locate information stored in a wide variety of forms;
- an extended service to maintain caches of frequently-used on-line documents at strategic locations across Europe to reduce bandwidth requirements and improve the speed of retrieval by researchers.
The mission of the Resource Discovery Network in the United Kingdom is to provide a new level of access to high quality Web resources by developing a Network Centre and a set of hubs. Hubs are faculty-level organisations, which help achieve scale economies across related subject areas, and are the focus for collection development activity. Hubs will provide gateways to collections in related sets of subject areas.
The portal is another subject gateway concept with the added dimension of customisation to offer a personalised service.
Digitised Resources
Many national, state, public and other libraries that hold significant analogue collections of rare and unique materials feel an obligation to make these materials as widely available as possible to the citizens who 'own' them, regardless of their geographic location. To this end libraries are digitising materials that they already hold and are placing them online to enhance access to them. An outstanding example of this kind of online collection is the American Memory of the Library of Congress.
The concept of enhanced citizen access to online information is also taking shape in projects like the Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual Library (KCVL). The university, state and public libraries have joined forces to obtain access to commercial online publications at affordable prices. The KCVL offers to all citizens of Kentucky a wide range of electronic databases including nearly 5,000 full text journal and newspaper titles. End user initiated document delivery is a feature of the service, with electronic article delivery as well as a courier service for physical items planned to commence in the northern summer of 2000. A call centre with help desk services operates from 8.00am to 7.00pm Monday to Friday.
The National Library of Australia, in association with the state libraries, is looking at the issue of home based citizen access to sets of commercial online publications.
Digital Reference Service
The online environment has seen a change in the way researchers approach libraries for reference service, with a transition from print to email inquiries. The Web provides the wherewithal for libraries to respond by delivering a range of digital reference services. At the simplest level, many libraries have developed online reference inquiry forms. At a more sophisticated level are pro-active projects that are transforming the notion of reference service in the electronic world.
The Collaborative Digital Reference Service (Digiref) initiated by the Library of Congress and the Virtual Reference Desk are prominent examples and demonstrate the advantages of collaborative relationships in the cyberworld, a subject I shall come back to later in this paper.
Digiref is proposed as a collaborative remote reference service involving international partners that will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, providing assistance from reference librarians in partner libraries to users anytime, anywhere. It will
- provide reference assistance in real time;
- be provided by knowledgeable and experience librarians;
- be reliable and contextual, referring to both digital and analogue resources;
- emphasise staff and collection strengths of partner libraries;
- use email, Web forms, or other send/receive methods;
- maintain a confidential searchable archive of questions and answers.
The Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) is a project of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology and the U.S. Department of Educations National Library of Education. The project goal is to establish a national cooperative digital reference service for the kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) education community. Digital reference, or "AskA" services, are linking questions from the K-12 education community to expert respondents.
Strategy 2. Ensuring long term access to online publications
Chaos factors addressed
- Broken links
- Difficulty of citing Web publications
- Ephemeral nature of online publications - here today, lost or changed tomorrow
In the foregoing section, I have referred to the concept of virtual collection, where the library providing access to resources often does not hold them within its building. For one group of libraries, however, the concept of collection in the cyberworld is by no means redundant. For National and other deposit libraries, the collection of online publications is a vital issue. Because of their role of preserving the publishing output of their nation or other relevant jurisdiction, it is not sufficient merely to point to the document somewhere else. In order to ensure long term access to a digital publication, the responsible library must have custody of it.
A handful of national libraries has begun to build archives of online publications in order to ensure that they remain available to researchers of the future. The National Libraries of Canada, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Australia have established archives and the Swiss National Library, the Diet Library of Japan and the National Library of New Zealand are well into the planning phase.
In order to ensure long term access to online publications, a two step process is essential. Firstly, the titles must be archived and secondly, they must be preserved. Both of these processes are very complex and have technical, legal and organisational implications. My colleague, Colin Webb, has dealt with the preservation aspects in the paper he gave yesterday, 'The Role of Preservation and the Library of the Future'. I shall not go into any detail here, therefore, except to say that the challenge for preservation is to ensure that, as far as possible, we can continue to provide access to both the content and the functionality of online titles through successive generations of hardware and software.
In establishing a collection of online publications, one of the first questions a deposit library needs to resolve is whether it should be comprehensive or selective. The National Library of Australia decided on a selective approach because of the low research value of many online publications. We want to focus finite resources on making titles with long-term research value immediately accessible and with full content and functionality. The National Library of Canada also takes a selective approach and, like its Australian counterpart, provides current access to titles in its archive.
Both libraries have devised selection guidelines that determine which titles are suitable for inclusion in the archive.
The National Libraries of Sweden and Finland, on the other hand, are taking a comprehensive approach by attempting to archive the entire Swedish and Finnish domains respectively. While they are almost certainly sacrificing quality for quantity, they see value in having as complete a record as possible of their countries' domains.
It has been very useful to be able to compare the experiments with these divergent approaches to archiving. The libraries involved have demonstrated what can be done and have identified obstacles that need to be overcome to perfect the processes. Technically there are problems with titles that use more complex creation software, for instance Flash and streaming audio and video. The technical capability of the gathering robots lags behind that of the creation software. The selective approach enables the technical failures to be analysed and addressed, while the sheer volume of files involved in the comprehensive archive mitigates against this quality control process.
There are also legal implications, which I shall address in more detail later in the paper. Canada and Australia negotiate with publishers for permission to archive titles and provide access to them. This is impossible under the comprehensive approach, and whether or not access to the comprehensive archives will be possible in future is still very unclear.
On its own this strategy of ensuring long term access to online publications will not be sufficient to solve the problems of broken links and the difficulty of citing Web publications. However, together with other strategies, especially those relating to describing and persistently identifying publications, it will provide stable archives of significant publications to which researchers can be directed once the original version on the publisher's site has vanished.
Strategy 3. Describing and Persistently Identifying Online Publications
Chaos factors addressed
- How do I find what's out there?
- Unmanageable number of 'hits' when we do a search
- Difficulty of citing Web publications
- Changed versions - is this the same version I looked at yesterday?
- Broken links
- Ephemeral nature of electronic publications.
Description
Closely allied to facilitating access to resources in the cyberworld are the issues of description and persistent identification. Ironically, since for a while painstaking description of online publications became unfashionable, almost all of the chaos factors can be made more manageable by describing and identifying online publications. They require two different types of description: title level full cataloguing for the purposes of inclusion in the national bibliography and for the integration of electronic with print and other library resources, as well as description of parts of the title for the purpose of resource discovery.
As mentioned in the introduction to this paper, search engines that scan the full text of a document have had limited success in providing relevant results sets. The need for 'metadata', what librarians have long been producing in the form of a catalogue record, was soon realised. A search engine searching metadata created according to recognised standards will produce much more useful results. It can either be embedded in the document or stored in a separate repository.
Because of the huge volume of online resources and the labour-intensive nature of MARC record creation, there has been quite vehement argument from some quarters against cataloguing online publications in the traditional way. There have been many attempts to find ways of simplifying the description of online resources, the most notable of these being the Dublin Core element set.
'The Dublin Core is a metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources. Originally conceived for author-generated description of Web resources, it has attracted the attention of formal resource description communities such as museums, libraries, government agencies, and commercial organizations.'
It has been used as the basis for other extended metadata sets, such as the Australian Government Locator Service for Australian government records and is the basis of many projects around the world aimed at improving resource discovery of online resources. A number of Dublin Core metadata generators have been built, including those by the Nordic Metadata Project and the Distributed Systems Technology Centre DSTC). Analysis of metadata creation tools has been undertaken by the MetaWeb Project.
The original intention of Dublin Core was to provide for author-generated description of resources. However, a recent study by Lloyd Sokvitne at the State Library of Tasmania in Australia suggests that Dublin Core metadata is not necessarily very useful in improving the results of Web searches when assigned by those untrained or unskilled in assigning indexing terms. The metadata from 20 Australian government and educational organisations was analysed and assessed for its capacity to facilitate title, creator/publisher and subject access. The title was correctly replicated in the title field in only 48 per cent of cases. Creator/publisher and subject terms were also poorly applied. The results of this study suggests that automated and author assigned metadata still has serious limitations and there is still no substitute for the assignment of metadata by skilled indexers and librarians.
Cataloguing
There is a strong argument for cataloguing online publications. The final recommendations of the IFLA International Conference on National Bibliographic Services emphasised the need to strengthen national bibliographic control. Electronic publications, including online publications, should be fully catalogued and included in national bibliographies, providing a clear statement of a national library's intention to preserve the item as part of the national imprint.
The National Library of Australia made an early decision to create full MARC records for the titles in the PANDORA Archive because, as well as including electronic items in the national bibliography, it is desirable to integrate their discovery with traditional library materials.
The CORC Project run by OCLC is an initiative of major significance, 'a research project exploring and promoting the cooperative creation of Web resource descriptions '. It provides a tool for describing online resources where the description can be created in either MARC or Dublin Core and converted to the other. CORC emphasises exporting the records in forms useable on the Web (for example, HTML, XML) so that libraries can incorporate them into their local systems. CORC is also working on adding views of the database to represent CORC data as a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) or Encoded Archive Description (EAD).
Another interesting project in the area of description of electronic publications is the BIBLINK Project (Linking Publishers and National Bibliographic Services) which commenced in May 1996. It aims to establish a relationship between national bibliographic agencies (NBA) and publishers of electronic material, in order to establish authoritative bibliographic information that will benefit both sectors. A prototype system for the exchange of metadata will enable a publisher to transmit bibliographic data to a national bibliographic agency, the NBA to adapt the data to its own requirements and then to return the enhanced record to the publishers. The NBA will receive timely and authoritative bibliographic information in advance of publication. The publishers' publications will be recorded in the national bibliography as soon as possible after publication and any metadata appearing in the publications will have been verified by the NBA.
Describing Parts of a Publication
To offer a full range of services to our patrons, we need to do more than describe at title level. There is the question of how to provide access to parts of online titles. For instance, we need to enable researchers to discover articles within issues of journals in national archives of online publications. Metadata repositories combined with suitable search engines will be one way of achieving this.
The Nordic countries have led the way in this area with the development of a suite of tools by the Nordic Metadata Project, which enables the creation of metadata (as already mentioned) and Uniform Resource Names for Web documents. Metadata generated through the Dublin Core generator was gathered into the Nordic Web Index and was searchable. Unfortunately, because of lack of funding, the NWI has been closed for the time being, but there is the hope that it can be resurrected in the future. It has been an important demonstrator of what can be done in this area of description and identification of online resources.
Another means of facilitating access to parts of publications is being tried at the National Library of Australia. Indexing and abstracting agencies that are including electronic titles in their services are already encountering the problem of broken links in citations. To ensure the longevity of links to cited materials, the National Library upon request will, with the permission of the rights owner, archive any Australian online publication that is being indexed by a service anywhere in the world. It will provide a persistent identifier for the copy in the archive, which can then be included in the citation. When the publisher's site no longer exists, the item will still be available in the national collection. This is a very useful partnership with an important sector of the information industry. Indexers and abstracters are subject experts and their input can assist us to build a much stronger archive.
Persistent Identification
Broken links, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that fail resulting in '404' error message, are one of the major frustrations of the cyberworld. The link to the information resource used yesterday is broken. Or, if it is still there, it has changed overnight. How can publications be located reliably? How can we keep track of versions? How can I cite a publication today and know that the lecturer who reads my paper in a week's time will see the same publication?
The key to this problem lies in the fact that the URL is a location device. An item may change locations, or the content of an item at a particular location may change. In addition to a location device, a publication requires a persistent identifier of content that will not change and will remain with the item regardless of location and across multiple locations.
In the print world, of course, since the 1960s, persistent identifiers such as International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) have enabled publishers, librarians and researchers to identify, locate and distribute titles and editions of titles. While these can be used for some online publications, they are not applicable to others. In addition, these traditional numbering schemes do not 'resolve', that is, they do not enable a researcher to navigate instantaneously from a citation to the item itself, which is a facility we have come to take for granted for online publications. (Indirect resolution using ISBN and ISSN can be achieved for some relevant publications via the bibliographic record in a library catalogue.)
The allocation of a persistent identifier does not guarantee that an online title will remain perennially available, just as an ISBN does not guarantee that a print title will always be in print. However, Persistent Identifiers make it possible to identify a publication with surety and to enable schemes to be put in place to facilitate ongoing linking and access.
There are two aspects to persistent identification: the allocation of a unique and persistent identifier and the organisational infrastructure to enable its resolution. A great deal of work has already gone into the former by the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) which has developed a framework for Uniform Resource Names but as yet no resolution systems exist to take advantage of this work.
A small working group of national libraries, under the auspices of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries, has begun to explore the implementation of a system of National Bibliography Numbers (NBNs) that would use the URN framework. This would enable national libraries to assign persistent identifiers to copies of online publications acquired under legal deposit and other arrangements. Another possible use for NBNs may be their assignment by authors and publishers to 'grey literature', those online publications that fall outside other schemes, such as ISSN , ISBN and Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
The Digital Object Identifier is a development of the International DOI Federation, designed to meet the needs of publishers for a persistent identifier that supports commerce in the object, rights trading and tracking, discovery and location, cataloguing, and citation. ' [T]he DOI is both an identifier and a specific implementation of that identifier - using CNRI's [Corporation for National Research Initiatives] Handle technology to provide publishers and other rights owners with what is essentially a URN-like 'routing' service.'
The ISSN International Centre has commenced the Electronic Archive Registry (EAR) Project to test the viability of the URN framework for the management of an electronic archive registry. The pilot relies on a set of tools, which has been developed and implemented at the ISSN International Centre. They enable the use of ISSN numbers as persistent identifiers within an ISSN Namespace and include three main components:
- a resolution system based on a map from the persistent identifier to sets of URLs;
- a URL watcher which checks the reliability of the mapping everyday;
- a plug-in which enables a user to type the persistent identifier into the location box of the browser and to retrieve the set of services. mapped to this ISSN number. (This takes into account that the currently available browsers do not recognise URNs.)
Persistent identifiers are a key component of another concept called 'reference linking'. This addresses the chaos factor of multiple copies or different versions of a work being available on the Web, and the problem of knowing which is the one required or which the user is entitled to see. For instance, a student of a particular university may be entitled to access one of the copies free of charge because it is part of a set distributed by an aggregator to which the university subscribes. Models for this concept are being developed. It is recognised as being a difficult architectural problem, requiring a system that must be 'smart' enough to select the most appropriate location(s) for the user, or provide enough information to allow the user to make this decision.
Strategy 4. Managing the Organisational Issues
Chaos factors addressed
- Libraries trying to keep up with both the cyber and the print worlds and attempting to provide the best of both for their patrons
- Staff needing new skills and expertise
For most libraries, the need to manage information sources on the Web is new business that must be dealt with in addition to traditional library materials, which show no sign of declining. The integration of traditional, digitised and original electronic materials is central to the concept of the 'hybrid' library, where the discovery of and access to library materials, regardless of format, is facilitated by a Web interface.
Online materials can both be discovered and accessed online. In the case of traditional library materials, the discovery of the existence and location of an item is also online through a catalogue with a Web interface. This is followed by access to the item via an online document supply system with delivery either of the physical item, or of a digitised version to a library, office, school or home desk top.
Cost
Anecdotal evidence suggests that few libraries are being funded for this new business or the technical infrastructure required for it. In fact, the need to accommodate this new medium comes at a time when public funding is contracting or at best remaining stationary. This requires creative reorganisation of existing structures and work practices to be able to do more with less.
For deposit libraries the cost of building and maintaining a collection of online publications is considerable. In every respect, they are more labour-intensive (and therefore costly) to deal with than print publications are. For instance, our experience suggests that it takes staff at least seven times as long to acquire an online publication as it does a print publication. And this is only the first instance of it. Many electronic publications change frequently and the archive needs to be updated on a regular basis with subsequent instances. A study by the British Library provides a startling analysis of the costs of acquiring, storing and preserving electronic publications.
Ongoing management of these titles requires the intervention of skilled staff at regular intervals. The technical infrastructure required to manage and provide access to online publications is very expensive to develop, implement and maintain.
Managing the costs of operating in the online environment is partly addressed by strategy 6, Cooperating and Collaborating.
New Structures and Work Practices
Apart from the cost, there are other factors that will influence a library to review its practices.
In the past it has been possible for an individual or a work group to work more or less independently on a given task, for example, building a collection of print government publications. It was possible for an experienced, conscientious member of staff to develop all the expertise and knowledge needed to run the operation and provide advice to management. At the National Library of Australia, we have found that the cyberworld is so complex and changes so quickly that it is not possible for one individual, even one work group, to have all the knowledge necessary to build and manage a collection. It is necessary to draw on expertise from many individuals across the agency - Technical Services, Information Technology, Preservation Services, Reference and other specialist units, and sometimes from external consultants as well - to make progress with this work.
This has required a more flexible approach to the organisation of work, with staff moving beyond the formal organisational structure to form short-term, part-time teams and working groups to focus on a particular task or to solve a particular problem.
Closely related to this is the need for staff with new skills and abilities. It is no longer sufficient to have Information Technology staff who are wizards at programming and solving technical problems. We need them to be able to communicate clearly with non-technical staff as well. Similarly, Technical Services staff who are proficient at selection, acquisition and cataloguing, now also need to develop technical knowledge as well. This requires investment in formal training as well as opportunity to experiment and learn on the job. It has been necessary to forge closer relationships and new lines of communication between working groups that previously did not have much to do with each other. In some cases it has been necessary to create new, specialised work groups.
Strategy 5. Managing the Legal Issues
Chaos factors addressed
- Negotiating the morass of intellectual property rights
- Who owns what?
- How can we ensure that publisher get fair return and readers get fair access?
- Rational access to commercial publications - licence agreements
Legal Deposit
For most national libraries, legal deposit legislation has been an aid to traditional collection building. Legal deposit legislation in most countries, including Australia, was framed before the advent of electronic publications and consequently is not worded broadly enough to include them. This leaves libraries both with the task of lobbying for change to the legislation and managing in the interim without it.
One of the issues in drafting new deposit legislation is how to define terms such as 'publication', 'publishing', or 'place of publication' to encompass online publications. In addition, there is the question of how to ensure definitions are inclusive enough to cover new publishing formats, which will be developed in the future. Networked electronic publications will not remain accessible for long in their original published formats and it is necessary to include in any revised legislation authority for the national library to migrate publications to new formats for the purposes of preservation.
Legal deposit of print publications, especially categories such as government, academic, and mainstream commercial publishing, does not require much selection activity. However, even when legal deposit is in place for electronic publications, we anticipate there will still be the need to be highly selective.
In the words of the National Library of Canada
The main difficulty in extending legal deposit to network publishing is that legal deposit is a relatively indiscriminate acquisition mechanism that aims at comprehensiveness. In the network environment, any individual with access to the Internet can be a publisher, and the network publishing process does not always provide the initial screening and selection at the manuscript stage on which libraries have traditionally relied in the print environment Selection policies are, therefore, needed to ensure the collection of publications of lasting cultural and research value.
Intellectual Property Rights
How do we protect the intellectual property of those who publish on the Web? How do we balance the need for public access to information with the right of creators and publishers to a fair financial return on their work? How do we ensure that they receive that fair return? The management of intellectual property rights is one of the major unresolved challenges for those involved in the online information industry.
A significant step towards a solution is being provided by INDECS (Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce Systems), an international initiative of rights owners. 'At the heart of the project is the development of a data model for intellectual property, a formal structure for describing and uniquely identifying intellectual property itself, the people and businesses involved in its trading, and the agreements which they make about it. From this model, metadata standards are being developed and proposed.'
INDECS and the International DOI Federation, previously mentioned in relation to persistent identifiers, have formed an alliance to develop mutually supportive standards and activities.
Until satisfactory mechanisms can be put in place for the management of rights to online materials, creators and publishers with a commercial interest will continue to be cautious about making them available through libraries. This not only has implications for current access, but also for long term preservation.
Publishers are particularly concerned about Intellectual Property Rights in relation to legal deposit material. They fear that their titles will be networked, copyright infringed, and their income from them undermined. It would not be in the interests of a healthy information industry for libraries to allow this to happen. Even when legal deposit legislation is in place, libraries and publishers will need to work together cooperatively to achieve the best possible balance between fair financial return to publishers and reasonable access for researchers.
In Australia, one proposal being considered by libraries and publishers together would permit deposit libraries to provide access to online titles to patrons within the library building only for an agreed period of commercial viability. (This could vary from title to title.) Once the period of commercial viability had passed, the library would be able to network it freely.
Licence Agreements
A major burden for libraries moving into the electronic realm has been the need to enter into licence agreements with commercial publishers in order to acquire and provide access to information in digital formats. The plethora of agreements that potentially have to be managed, as well as the feeling of being on the back foot when it comes to negotiating conditions and charges, has propelled libraries into consortial partnerships to increase their bargaining power and to reduce the number of licences. Initiatives like NESLI (National Electronic Site Licence Initiative) in the United Kingdom and the Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual Library previously mentioned deal with this issue. NESLI concentrates, among other things, on the negotiation of value for money deals with leading scholarly publishers, handling the subscriptions, and the provision of a single interface for access. A Model Licence works toward standardisation of publishers' terms and conditions of access and use.
Strategy 6. Cooperating and Collaborating
Chaos issues addressed
- all
One of the outstanding aspects of the cyberworld is the high degree of interaction it engenders. On the one hand it makes it possible: the cyberworld is about communication. On the other hand, it almost forces it, as it is such a complex and costly milieu that to make any useful progress at all requires the pooling of resources and expertise. Under the management of organisational issues I referred to the fact that, within organisations, new work practices and lines of communication are forming in response to the online environment. This is also happening between organisations. Libraries are finding it imperative to talk to each other, other collecting agencies such as archives, galleries and museums, as well as other organisations in the information industry, such as publishers' associations, in the search for solutions in this multi-faceted new world.
To realise the potential of the Web for access to information, collecting agencies, their metadata repositories, and their collections must be able to communicate with each other. From a technological point of view, therefore, they must be interoperable, and this requires a significant cooperative effort to develop and implement standards for description, interchange of library data, system interconnection, digital formats and preservation standards. The National Library has listed a wide range of standards it finds relevant to its work in this area, to maintain a watching brief over national and international standards activities to ensure that the appropriate standards framework is in place or under development to support its business activities.
Through collaboration the breadth and depth of collections and services can be increased, rights licensing can be more effectively negotiated, better management of standards and practices can be achieved, and overhead and investment costs can be contained.
New alliances are being formed and this cooperation is found not only within sectors within countries, but is frequently cross-sectoral and international. Libraries, galleries and museums collaborate to build virtual collections of images. Libraries, archives and historical societies combine to provide resource discovery data for manuscripts and organisational records. National libraries working in the specialised area of digital archiving have found exchange of information invaluable when designing business models and technical infrastructure.
Conclusion
Have we imposed order upon the chaos? Have we created form in the void? Considering that it is still less than a decade since the development of the World Wide Web, I believe that we can say that libraries, other collecting agencies and research organisations have created substantial order and form in the void. There is a long way to go. There will always be a long way to go, because as fast as we move ahead, new technology (and new possibilities) will be there before us.
Libraries and librarians have quickly established themselves as essential mediating agents in the cyberworld, applying and extending traditional principles of organisation and control in an exciting new environment, and seizing opportunities for creating new and enhanced services.
About the Speaker
Margaret E. Phillips has worked in libraries since 1976 and joined the staff of the National Library of Australia in 1987. In 1994 she became the manager of the Acquisitions Section where she increasingly dealt with electronic materials. In 1996, as manager of the newly created Australian Electronic Unit, she began to devote full-time attention to both online and physical format electronic publications. As a member of the PANDORA Project team, the Digital Services Project working group, the Persistent Identifier Task Force, and the Preservation Metadata working group, she has been closely involved with the establishment of policy and procedures for ensuring long term access to Australian Internet publications and with the development of a Digital Collections Management System.
