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LIBRARY AND 
INFORMATION SC 
LIBRARY 




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ENCE 



L161 O-1096 



Networks, Open Access, 
and Virtual Libraries: 

Implications for the 
Research Library 



Papers presented at the 1991 Clinic on Library Applications 
of Data Processing, April 7-9, 1991 

Sponsored by 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

and 
Committee on Institutional Cooperation 



Clinic on Library Applications 
of Data Processing: 1991 



Networks, Open Access, 
and Virtual Libraries: 

Implications for the 
Research Library 



Edited by 
BRETT SUTTON 

and 
CHARLES H. DAVIS 



Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



1992 by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 
ISBN 0-87845-087-4 ISSN 0069-4789 



Printed in the United States of America 
on acid-free paper 



T 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 1 

Brett Sutton 

Networked Information: A Revolution in Progress 12 

Clifford A. Lynch 

Networked Information Resources and Services: 

Next Steps on the Road to the Distributed Digital 

Libraries of the Twenty-first Century 40 

Paul Evan Peters 

Defining "It": NREN's Opportunities for Librarians 61 

Susan K. Martin 

Keeping the Window of Opportunity Open for the 

Private Sector 74 

James E. Rush 

The Use and Effect of Multimedia Digital Libraries 

in a National Network 84 

Charles E. Catlett 
Jeffrey A. Terstriep 

Networking Applications for Research Libraries 99 

M. E. L. Jacob 

The Changing Economics of Research Libraries 104 

Martin Runkle 

The Real Costs and Financial Challenges of Library 

Networking: Part 1 118 

Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis 

The Real Costs and Financial Challenges of Library 

Networking: Part 2 123 

Thomas W. Shaughnessy 



Contents (Cont.) 

The Real Costs and Financial Challenges of Library 

Networking: Part 3 128 

William J. Studer 

DRANET: An Information Network 132 

Carl R. Grant 

Libraries and Networked Information Systems: 

Selected Bibliography 137 

Brett Sutton 

Contributors 141 

Index . . 145 



Introduction 



ELECTRONIC NETWORKS 

Networked digital communication is one of the most rapidly maturing 
technologies in computing. Systems are now in place for conveying 
electronic messages, documents, and images rapidly and efficiently across 
long distances; for reaching multiple sites simultaneously; and for 
linking dissimilar computers interactively in an open communications 
environment. What is notable about networking is not only the 
remarkable technology on which it is based but the rapid expansion 
of its influence. Networked computing was once known mainly to 
scientists and other specialists fortunate enough to have access to the 
technology and willing to learn the necessary skills, but that is changing. 
With costs and administrative barriers to the networks falling, and useful 
applications and network access points increasing, networked 
computing is on the verge of entering the mainstream. A principal 
question for some observers has become not whether digital networks 
will become as commonplace as the telephone but when. Many other 
questions remain, however, especially for organizations considering the 
possibilities of converting from conventional to network processes. 
Electronic networks pose a variety of operational, economic, and social 
problems, only some of which have been solved. 

Research libraries are among the organizations that are feeling the 
effects of this convergence of technologies. Not only are innovations 
in networking likely to transform a variety of traditional library 
operations (acquisitions, cataloging, interlibrary loan, reference work, 
resource sharing, and document delivery, to name a few), but they will 
equip libraries with the tools to create new kinds of services as well. 



BRETT SUTTON 



Research librarians are now beginning to ask themselves, with a new 
sense of urgency, how they might take advantage of this new environment 
while preserving the best of their traditional roles. These are difficult 
decisions because development costs are high, support for college and 
university libraries is already spread too thin, and in spite of progress 
in the setting of standards there is a great deal of movement and 
instability in the technical environment. 

Whether these new circumstances constitute a crisis or an 
opportunity depends partly on local conditions. Some libraries, 
especially those with plentiful resources, an administrative taste for 
experimental system development, and key staff members to take 
leadership roles, have been successful in adapting the emerging network 
technologies to fit existing services and devising new services specifically 
for the networked environment. Other libraries with less flexibility and 
fewer resources have proceeded more cautiously, opting for fewer 
immediate benefits in exchange for fewer risks. At stake is not just the 
operational issue of how research libraries will do their jobs but the 
changing role of the research library itself. Not everyone involved is 
convinced that progress towards the networked library is compatible 
with the research library's established academic identity and purpose. 
For some observers, the research library is too bound to its historic 
mission of storing and organizing printed materials, too well adapted 
to its traditional niche and unable to evolve quickly enough, and will 
have to adjust to a diminished role in the future if it survives the transition 
at all. But other observers see the research library as an organic, adaptive 
institution, capable of riding the forces of change to emerge as a leader 
in networked information services. A unified vision for the research 
library of the future does not yet exist. 

Coming to terms with the consequences of library networking, and 
contributing to its realization, is the collective task of everyone who 
has a role in the future of the research library. The essays in this volume 
are part of that effort. The writers, who address a range of issues in 
computer networking and its application in research libraries, include 
academic library directors, system developers and administrators, 
members of the scientific computing community, library consultants, 
and university administrators. Some are technical authorities, but many 
are not. The diversity of the expertise they bring to the question of 
higher education, research, and networked information systems is as 
varied as the conclusions they have drawn. Collectively they present 
a realistic picture of the adaptive processes that are taking place at 
the intersection of the research library and advanced computer 
networking. 



INTRODUCTION 



THE ORIGINS OF LIBRARY NETWORKING 

The emergence of the network model of digital communication 
and its adoption by the library community cannot be traced to any 
single event or organization but has developed along several fronts 
simultaneously. One of the first networking systems to become widely 
used in colleges and universities was BITNET, a mainframe-based 
messaging and file transfer system. Besides taking advantage of the 
electronic mail services of BITNET, academic librarians have used 
BITNET's LISTSERV software to establish a number of computer 
conferences devoted to library topics. The scientific community, working 
in conjunction with the government and the computing and 
telecommunications industries, have fostered the development of other 
networks, including ARPANET, established under the auspices of the 
Advanced Research Project Agency of the Department of Defense, and 
its successor, NSFNET. These systems, faster and more interactive than 
BITNET, have evolved into what is now known as the Internet, the 
global network of networks that has become the most direct means 
for interconnecting the educational, research, and library communities. 
The Internet is the model and inspiration for the more powerful and 
inclusive networking systems that are still in the planning stages. 

Although the academic community has carried much of the 
responsibility for creating these networks, government has played a 
critical role, both administratively and financially. The seriousness of 
the federal commitment to the national network has been manifested 
most recently by the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991. This 
legislation, championed by Senator Albert Gore, will establish the 
National Research and Education Network (NREN), an administrative 
structure designed to promote the continued development of the national 
computer network, which will in turn support development projects 
in both education and industry. Constituting the primary links in this 
network is the national "backbone," a set of fiber-optic trunk lines 
operated by the National Science Foundation. This backbone, already 
in place but constantly being upgraded, provides fast long-distance data 
transmission services to various regional, state, and organizational 
networks, which in turn extend network access to their own 
communities. The capacity of this network for moving data, projected 
to reach 3 billion bits per second before the end of the decade, has 
suggested the operating metaphor of a "superhighway," analogous to 
the federal interstate highway system begun in the 1950s. Although 
these electronic highways are constructed of fast transmission lines and 
advanced processing machines rather than asphalt and concrete, the 
analogy is a useful one. Like the federal highway system, the network 
is planned to be a public resource, established with public funds, 



BRETT SUTTON 



constructed by commercial contractors, and made freely available to 
a wide variety of users at many different levels. Advocates of library 
networking have recognized that the NREN's primary roles, facilitating 
educational communication and disseminating information, are also 
the primary roles of the academic library, and they believe that the 
network represents a golden opportunity for libraries to lend their 
expertise to the effort of developing a productive new research 
environment. 

Although the excitement over the Internet is the most immediate 
source of librarians' interest in networking, shared access to remote 
computers is an idea that is well established in the library community. 
Like many other public and private organizations, libraries have 
practiced their own forms of networking for many years. Since the 
development of the first automated systems, libraries have found ways 
to provide enhanced electronic access to their holdings, beginning with 
locally designed, mainframe-based circulation systems in the 1960s, 
which were succeeded by the efficient turnkey systems of the 1970s, 
and more recently by hybrid systems taking advantage of small but 
ubiquitous and increasingly interconnected microcomputers in the 
1980s. The introduction of the MARC (machine-readable cataloging) 
record and other standards helped to launch OCLC, RLIN, and 
numerous regional library networks dedicated to the sharing of 
cataloging and authority records and other automated services. These 
developments helped make possible collaborative automation efforts 
in which a single system could provide collective access to the holdings 
of cooperating libraries, facilitating resource sharing that benefited 
libraries both small and large. 

The success of automated systems has fostered the development 
of numerous new features: online public access catalogs supporting 
enhanced searching techniques, supplementary bibliographic databases 
mounted alongside the public access catalog, CD-ROMs mounted on 
local area networks. At many sites, these library resources have been 
linked to other information utilities in campuswide networked 
information systems, and some have even been opened up to remote 
users over wide area networks. Librarians are also users of other kinds 
of networks, including the commercial packet switching services that 
provide access to remote commercial database providers such as DIALOG 
and BRS, direct lines to book jobbers, and networks established by 
vendors of automated library systems for their clients. The Internet 
has already begun to absorb some of the traffic generated by these 
applications. The point is that when libraries compare the new networks 
with their own operations, their standard of comparison is not manual 
operations, but a well developed, though more localized and controlled, 
form of networking. 



INTRODUCTION 



Finally, it is worth noting that the inspiration for networking has 
not come exclusively from institutional sources, whether government, 
industry, or the universities. Much of the creative energy that has gone 
into the development of network resources has come not from formal 
organizations at all but from self-educated experimenters working 
locally in less-structured environments. Individual users working on 
multiuser machines, or even on microcomputers equipped with 
inexpensive modems, have created, with very little central planning 
or supervision, a highly distributed, decentralized, grass roots kind of 
telecomputing that has helped pave the way for more institutionalized 
networks. It is these users, enthusiastically embracing the concept of 
"cyberspace" and pioneering computer conferences and bulletin boards 
in networks such as USENET, FIDONET, and more recently the WELL, 
that are now calling for the democratization of the networks and the 
removal of barriers separating the public from the powerful networks 
that well-placed academicians take for granted. It is not without 
significance that these values of open access and cooperation are also 
basic to the traditional library ethic. 



NETWORK APPLICATIONS IN LIBRARIES 

The national network is essentially a communication system that 
constitutes an environment for performing certain tasks, but it does 
not specify what those tasks should be. Like the computer itself, it 
is a multipurpose tool that can be adapted to serve a diverse range 
of activities. One of the main tasks for libraries, in fact, is to invent 
interesting new uses for this powerful resource. The Internet has already 
been the setting for a variety of experiments in information 
dissemination potentially useful to the library community, only some 
of which have been created in library settings. These experiments are 
the early stages of a development process that will eventually yield new 
multimedia communication systems, new forms of electronic publishing, 
transmission that will be for practical purposes instantaneous, and direct 
access to data collections larger than many sites could store locally. 
Many leaders in the library community believe that research libraries, 
because of their long experience in organizing information, should take 
a leadership role in developing these new network applications. Several 
contributors to this volume, particularly Clifford Lynch and Paul Peters, 
discuss in some detail the potential of library networking in this 
environment. 

Although predicting how network applications will eventually 
unfold is difficult, it is possible to identify from current practice the 
various sorts of functions that are most likely to receive attention in 



BRETT SUTTON 



the future. Among the simplest and most widely used network features 
are electronic mail and file transfer between individuals. In libraries, 
these tools can serve not only as a medium for maintaining professional 
contacts, but these tools have potential in collaborative reference work 
and the delivery of search results to patrons. Extended to public bulletin 
board and conferencing environments, these applications make it 
possible for special interest groups to carry on open discussions with 
unprecedented immediacy and efficiency. With some additional 
development, these basic communications tools will make it possible 
for a wide variety of more formal library business transactions, such 
as book ordering and interlibrary loan requests, to be handled in the 
paper-free environment of the network. 

Another promising area of network development is direct electronic 
access to library resources across institutional boundaries. Many research 
libraries, having created in-house online public access catalogs (OPACs), 
have taken additional steps to make them available to local users via 
dialup lines, and more broadly to remote users over the Internet. 
Although it is true that the primary clients of remote library catalogs 
are professional staff and others with Internet skills and access privileges, 
some libraries have begun to build within their own public access systems 
bridges to selected remote systems as a service to all users. For example, 
at this writing, users of the University of California's MELVYL system 
have access, if they want it, to university library catalogs in Colorado, 
New Mexico, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and several other states. One 
problem is that users of remote systems, for the time being anyway, 
must learn to use each system and the peculiarities of its interface 
separately a rather daunting prospect for those who may not even 
know their home systems very well. The implementation of standards 
such as the Z39.50 protocols for information retrieval may eventually 
provide for more transparent remote access, but at this stage using remote 
systems requires patience and practice. 

Online library catalogs are no longer restricted to being electronic 
versions of the card catalog but are becoming multidimensional 
information systems. Many research libraries now provide access for 
local users to supplementary databases of journal literature from 
commercial sources such as Wilson or DIALOG. These resources are 
usually subject to license restrictions that permit access to local users 
only. Remote users are becoming familiar with the frustration of seeing 
them listed on the OPAC's opening menu, only to find they have no 
access privileges. Some libraries, however, have developed their own 
supplementary databases that are not restricted and are freely available 
to guest users from outside the community. Such systems, developed 
locally but designed for open network access, are already common in 
the scientific community. Charles Catlett and Jeffrey Terstriep of the 



INTRODUCTION 



National Center for Supercomputing Applications describe in this 
volume research that will lead to the development of "digital libraries" 
for the storage and network dissemination of scientific data. Some 
libraries, too, have established interesting and useful resources that are 
accessible via the Internet, such as Dartmouth's full-text Shakespeare 
database and CARL's collection of book reviews from Choice. At some 
sites, the online library resources are part of comprehensive campus 
information systems offering information on campus events, faculty 
directories, course schedules, bookstore inventories, and other useful 
topics. Other systems, such as the Cleveland FreeNet, are public systems 
serving the entire community. 

Still in the experimental stages, but potentially capable of radically 
altering the way research results are disseminated, is the electronic 
journal. Whether peer reviewed or not, free or fee based, issued regularly 
or irregularly, these network-distributed sources of scholarly writing 
enjoy several advantages over their printed counterparts, particularly 
in the speed with which research results can be made available to a 
community of interested scholars. A number of issues remain unresolved. 
For the research community, details relating to peer review, credit for 
promotion and tenure, copyright, and cost recovery have yet to be worked 
out. For libraries, the challenges include solving the unique acquisitions, 
storage, and public access problems presented by electronic publications. 
Also unresolved is the very form such journals will take. Most of the 
existing journals are distributed as simple text files, similar in form 
to standard electronic mail, but there is some interest in providing more 
sophisticated formats. An example is the recently announced electronic 
publication, the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, produced 
jointly by the American Association for the Advancement of Science 
and OCLC. This publication will be distributed in a graphics format 
permitting, with the use of appropriate software, the display of 
illustrations and typeset-quality printing. Such journals, if successful, 
could become an important new source of scholarly information, and 
libraries will have to find ways to access and manage them. 

The presence on the network of electronic archives containing 
documents, directories, back issues of electronic journals and newsletters, 
and even software, all available for copying across the network, 
constitutes another potentially useful resource for research libraries. Such 
repositories could serve as elements of a large distributed database, 
permitting remote storage and fast access to certain classes of documents, 
thus sparing smaller libraries from having to maintain their own local 
copies. With the appropriate software to facilitate single-copy printing 
and binding of these electronic documents, these sources could also serve 
as dissemination points for on-demand publishing, a potentially 
effective way to manage the distribution of older or more specialized 



BRETT SUTTON 



documents for which formal publishing would not be cost-effective. 
With electronic scanning, it becomes possible to preserve rare and fragile 
documents and to make them widely available over the networks. These 
techniques are providing models for new, efficient forms of resource 
sharing, where access is instantaneous and the information delivery 
does not deplete the supply. These models stand in contrast to the 
traditional library model of local acquisition and local use and could 
lead potentially to the redefinition of the archival function of research 
libraries. 

Taken together, these highly fluid network resources suggest the 
outline of a new information structure, not limited by the boundaries 
of any single institution or possessing much of a distinct structure of 
its own, but capable of bridging the spaces between institutions a 
"virtual" library or "library without walls" some have called it. The 
terms may be somewhat metaphysical, but the prospect of an electronic 
network seamlessly and transparently linking libraries and other 
information sources into a single entity is not a mere fantasy. The virtual 
library is a reasonable extension of resource sharing goals that libraries 
have been pursuing for years. Pieces of such a system are already in 
place, and more are under construction. The pairing of interesting and 
unique local information sources with fast and efficient large-scale 
networks is a powerful combination, capable of transforming a modest 
desktop computer into an information-gathering device of un- 
precedented reach. 



PROBLEMS 

The network is a large and complex structure that has been built 
without the benefit of any master plan or blueprint and thus is 
constrained by no single design, but is rather the product of experiments 
and progressive refinements taking place simultaneously at numerous 
locations. This loose, organic, emergent characteristic of the network 
is one source of the problems that newly networked libraries are now 
facing: network processes do not always respect the economic, legal, 
political, technical, and functional boundaries within which libraries 
customarily operate. Much of what we thought we knew about the legal 
and ethical aspects of the information business will have to be relearned 
as library services become network services. Some of these problems 
are not amenable to technical solutions and will challenge the research 
library's ability to adapt administratively to a radically new model of 
librarianship. Concerns about the traditional library's ability to make 



INTRODUCTION 



the necessary changes has led pessimists to predict the demise of the 
library as we know it, and optimists to call for a bold reconstruction 
of the research library to meet the anticipated changes. 

Library directors know that a research library is anything but 
virtual. It has walls, a roof, substantial physical holdings that must 
be processed, disseminated, and preserved, and a large number of users 
still interested mainly in printed documents and traditional services. 
The comments of the research library directors presented in this 
collection help isolate the conflicts that the new networks raise in 
academic library settings. Among the most vexing are the economic 
problems. With the costs required to perform traditional library 
functions already high and getting higher, and with long-term funding 
unstable, the prospect of extending the library's operations into a 
networked environment is not always very inviting to administrators 
involved in the budget process. Martin Runkle provides an informative 
account of the economic predicament of research libraries, looks at the 
costs of networking, and asks the reasonable question, who will pay? 
Government funds for network development will not be available 
indefinitely, and it is likely that the involvement of the private sector 
in the network will become more prominent as some form of 
privatization takes place. 

Another problem raised by the current model of the national 
network is the lack of control. The typical academic library is founded 
on the principle of centralized control and organization, but the 
networks are, at the moment, highly decentralized and largely self- 
organizing. It is fortunate that groups such as the Coalition for 
Networked Information, ALA's Library and Information Technology 
Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and CICNet (cosponsor 
of this conference), have voluntarily taken a leadership role in network 
research, education, and planning. But what is still notable about the 
Internet are the things that we do not know about it, such as who 
exactly is connected, what services are available at any given moment, 
and what constitutes legitimate network use. A few network directories 
exist in both electronic and printed forms, but none is comprehensive. 
Some loose agreements about appropriate and inappropriate network 
activities have been established by certain groups of network users, but 
there is no policy-making body and no centralized authority for 
monitoring network activities or controlling users and resources. 
Libraries taking part in such a system may well find themselves in 
the unaccustomed and perhaps uncomfortable role of being part of 
a larger institutional structure in which they do not exercise any 
particular authority. The decentralized library is an administrative 
paradox, and linking the actual library to a more abstract virtual one 
will probably require some retooling. 



10 BRETT SUTTON 



Another set of problems has to do with ease of access. There are 
at least two dimensions to this problem, one technical and one political. 
Technical expertise, experience, and specialized software are among the 
requirements for achieving network access, and at the moment only 
a small group of users possesses these qualities. The lack of standardized 
operating commands makes the network a hazardous environment for 
the inexperienced user, who must make do without comprehensive 
training materials or even simple documentation. Librarians dream of 
a seamless web of information access, but in reality the network 
environment is strewn with traps for the unwary. At the moment, the 
network is still a frontier, and untamed, but many developers believe 
that it will have to be civilized in order to achieve its potential. Attempts 
to provide better training and to achieve true interoperability are 
underway, but progress is slow. 

The second aspect of the access question is political because it 
concerns network access policies. Network users are increasingly 
becoming a highly diverse lot, and it is not yet clear how to construct 
a system that can accommodate in a balanced way users ranging from 
kindergartners to research scientists. A particular problem is that, 
although the network infrastructure is supported in part with public 
funds, many interested potential users, including librarians eager to 
extend the information reach of their institutions, simply do not have 
a way to get in. Some fee-based Internet access points have recently 
become available, but in general only users at institutions that are already 
linked to the Internet and who have access to the necessary hardware, 
software, and support enjoy ready, subsidized network access. 
Information providers such as research labs, government agencies, and 
research libraries may be willing to open their doors to network users, 
but only the privileged few are able to take advantage of those resources. 
For many libraries, to learn of the network is to experience the frustration 
of the kid peeking through the fence at the ballpark, who can hear 
the cheering but cannot get close enough to enjoy the game. 

The political question, it should be pointed out, has another side: 
not every institution is willing to leave its electronic door unlocked 
and may prefer to restrict access to outside users. It is a reasonable 
response to economic pressures. Even large computer systems are finite, 
and when each outside user takes up a port and consumes machine 
cycles, it seems appropriate for libraries to draw distinctions between 
their primary and secondary user communities and to offer access 
accordingly. At the present time, networking technology is more 
advanced than networking policy. 



INTRODUCTION 11 



CONCLUSION 

An extended process of adaptation is taking place as libraries, along 
with many other kinds of organizations, come to terms with their future 
roles in the networked communications environment that, increasingly, 
they all share. It is a process of considerable complexity and extended 
duration and is not likely to be quickly resolved. This collection of 
essays is presented as a contribution to that part of the process relevant 
to research library services, an effort that has also produced, in recent 
months, several national conferences, a handful of new serial 
publications, numerous local workshops and training sessions, and 
many instances of experimentation, testing, and evaluation. In keeping 
with the growing significance of the network communications model, 
many of the results of these efforts are being disseminated over the 
network itself, which is ultimately where the success of this process 
will be measured. 

BRETT SUTTON 

Editor 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

The success of the conference that produced the papers in this 
volume was due not just to the presentations themselves, but also to 
the high level of discussion they generated. To conclude this 
introduction, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of the 
other invited speakers whose collective experience and insight added 
a valuable dimension to the discussions. These include Steve Cisler 
(Apple Computer, Inc.), Martin Dillon (OCLC), Carl Grant (Data 
Research Associates), Paul M. Hunt (Michigan State University), Ward 
Shaw (CARL), Bernard G. Sloan (Illinois Library Computer Systems 
Office), Mickie Voges (Chicago Kent School of Law), and Lou Wetherbee 
(Library Management Consultant). 

The editors are also grateful to CICNet, the network service of 
the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, for its generous assistance 
and cosponsorship. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the 
indispensable assistance of Roger Clark, director of CIC, who worked 
as co-organizer and problem solver throughout the planning of this 
event. 



CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 

Director, Library Automation 

Office of the President 

University of California 

Oakland, California 



Networked Information: A Revolution in Progress 



ABSTRACT 

Progress in telecommunications and information technology has 
extended computer communication networks and increased network 
speed. With the resulting increase in networked information, questions 
arise as to who will control it, who will supply it, and who will have 
access to it. The role of the library in this electronic networked 
environment is changing from providing access to traditional paper- 
based holdings to directly acquiring material in electronic form and 
providing access to it. Questions arise about interlibrary cooperation, 
clientele, and competition for patronage. In addition, the development 
of the end-user workstation that will access a range of networked 
information resources may lead to new information markets (such as 
competitive intelligence) and to the potential of multimedia information 
access and personal scholarly publishing. The traditional role of 
librarians will also change. Librarians will become information 
specialists, skilled in the management, searching, evaluation, and 
organization of information. Finally, library schools must expand and 
refocus their roles in training these information specialists. 



INTRODUCTION 

The word "revolution" has been debased in recent usage. Once 
used to describe political upheaval and forcible rearrangement of a power 
structure, it is now a hackneyed advertising device: We have not only 

12 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 13 



the hyperbole of "revolutionary technology" but the obscenity of 
"revolutionary new personal hygiene products." We have become 
desensitized to the meaning of revolutions. In fact, there is a revolution 
in progress, in the old, true sense of the word: Power structures and 
roles are being rearranged, sometimes forcibly, though without 
bloodshed. Fortunes will be made and lost and power will shift; some 
institutions will fade and others will move to dominate. 

In past revolutions, media and communications technologies have 
played a key role (Innes, 1972); although it seems more accurate to term 
the printing press, for example, an instrument of revolution rather than 
a revolutionary technology. The revolutions occurred long after the 
invention of the printing press as the presses were placed in the service 
of the revolutionaries. 

Today's revolution is about information: about who will control 
it, who will supply it, and who will have access to it. Drawn into this 
conflict are publishers and information providers, libraries, universities, 
and all types of information consumers. Instruments of this revolution 
are drawn from the armory of information technology and computer 
communications networks, as well as from the blending of existing 
mass market consumer technologies with the computer and digital 
networks. These instruments are already well refined; now they will 
be harnessed. 

Information most commonly of interest to libraries related to 
scholarship and culture and typically of relatively long-term value or 
interest as opposed to the ephemeral, time-sensitive information that 
drives the daily operation of finance, business, and government is one 
of the last areas to be drawn into the maelstrom of revolution. In the 
past two decades, the application of telecommunications and 
information technology has completely restructured the worlds of 
finance and commerce and, in a somewhat more subtle way, of 
government, international relations, and intelligence. Striking, 
suggestive parallels can be drawn between events that occurred in the 
spheres of finance and consumer market information and changes that 
are now happening in the realm of scholarly information and public 
knowledge. 

This paper, which is based on a keynote speech given at the 28th 
Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing in April 
1991, attempts to chart some aspects of the current revolution and the 
prospects for the "new order" that may result and emphasizes the fates 
of various types of libraries. Although a great deal of technology is 
surveyed superficially, the focus of the paper is not really technology 
but rather how technology may affect the information environment. 



14 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 

INSTRUMENTS OF REVOLUTION 

Networks and Connectivity 

Everyone is aware that networks are growing and spreading, but 
few realize how far and how fast. The Internet, a constellation of several 
thousand interconnected networks, now links between a quarter million 
and a million computers for interactive traffic and reaches every 
continent except, perhaps, Antarctica. Curiously, no one knows exactly 
how many computers or individuals are connected through the 
Internetwork. Furthermore, the Internet serves as a sort of core for a 
much larger community of users who can communicate with each other 
through electronic mail. This broader community of electronic mail 
users, which includes users of machines on BITNET and USENET 
and users of commercial electronic mail services such as MCIMAIL 
or CompuServe, reaches well into the millions, but again no one knows 
exactly how many people are really involved; and recent estimates suggest 
that people in over seventy nations participate. This global collection 
of networks is what John Quarterman (1990) calls, following the science- 
fiction author William Gibson (1984), "the (global) matrix." Others 
call it worldnet. 

The Internet, and the broader global matrix, reaches many of the 
expected places: universities, libraries, corporations, research 
laboratories, and government and military sites. It is also increasingly 
reaching some less likely places: public libraries, elementary and high 
schools, and even individual homes. In certain circles, it is no longer 
peculiar to find ethernet cable, a router, and a class C Internet Protocol 
network number for someone's residence. 

The massive growth of the networks was not exactly planned. The 
entire Internet, for example, can be understood as a research and 
development project that became so useful that it turned into an 
operational service and then grew out of control. Governance, funding, 
infrastructure planning, and technology development have all lagged 
far behind the explosive growth of connectivity; and network planners, 
engineers, and managers are struggling to keep up with the growth 
rate dealing with problems that range from the potential exhaustion 
of the address space used for assigning network addresses, effective 
network management and problem diagnosis in very large collections 
of linked, autonomous networks, and security and authentication 
mechanisms, through the need to devise workable governance policies 
and funding arrangements for the Internet. 

Powerful forces are at work both to extend connectivity and to 
increase network speeds. At the federal level in the United States, there 
is the movement for the National Research and Education Network 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 15 



(NREN), which is based on the executive branch's proposal for a High- 
Performance Computing and Communications Initiative from the Office 
of Science and Technology Planning and the legislative bills championed 
by Senator Albert Gore (SB 272 signed into law Dec. 9, 1991). The 
NREN movement calls for massive investment in very fast networks 
(gigabits per second) in the 1990s. Some versions of the NREN vision 
also call for ubiquitous networks that will reach elementary and 
secondary schools and public libraries across the nation. Some state 
legislatures (for example, in Texas) are considering initiatives to connect 
the elementary and high schools on a statewide basis. In addition, 
strategic partnerships among state government, regional networks, 
industry, and both elementary and higher education are growing more 
extensive. 

Of course, massive government and corporate computer and 
telecommunications networks have also been under development since 
the 1960s. The Internet, at least in the United States, has always been 
well connected to the government networks. The Advanced Research 
Projects Agency of the Department of Defense funded the original 
ARPANET network core and much of the basic research on 
internetworking. Part of ARPANET, split off and renamed MILNET, 
continues to support unclassified traffic among a large number of 
government and military sites. The National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration (NASA), the Department of Energy (DOE), and 
particularly the National Science Foundation (NSF) are heavily involved 
in the funding and operation of the current backbone networks for 
the Internet/NREN-to-be. Increasingly, large corporate networks are 
being connected to the Internet in the 1990s; today most of these belong 
to technology-oriented firms that exchange substantial communications 
with the university, research, and government institutions already on 
the network. But, in time, it seems likely that the enormous networks 
that have developed to support financial transactions, airline 
reservations, and other business enterprises will also be linked, at least 
in limited ways. 

Wireless communication is suddenly becoming widely available to 
the general public. Car phones and portable personal telephones are 
everywhere and are more compact and cheaper than ever. There is a 
long tradition of radio-based networking arising both out of amateur 
("ham") radio activities and military communications research. Both 
of these communities have long been part of the Internet (Lynch & 
Brownrigg, 1987). But now we are seeing major communications and 
information technology companies working on wireless network 
products for the commercial sector and the general public. Wireless 
local area networks are available, and proposals are before the Federal 
Communications Commission for the allocation of spectrum to support 



16 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



public wireless data communications. The sudden maturation of wireless 
networks in the 1990s is likely to produce notebook computers 
continually linked to the network by radio at relatively low speeds when 
being carried about and "docked" with larger machines connected to 
high-speed wire or optical fiber networks when the user is at a fixed 
location such as home or office. Perhaps access to the networks will 
become available to the general public via radio at low speeds without 
charge. 

Existing monopolies face continual pressure. The breakup of the 
Bell system in the United States has encouraged the development of 
low-cost, high-speed trunks for long-haul communication in the United 
States. Today, short-haul leased lines provided by local telephone 
companies are often more costly than interstate lines due to politically 
determined rate structures set by the state public utility commissions. 
In Europe, there is some loosening, through privatization initiatives, 
of the grip of the PTT monopolies that have restricted the development 
of computer networking. Internationally, monopolies such as Intelsat 
and the treaty arrangements with foreign telephone companies, which 
have kept the costs of international communications links high, are 
increasingly questioned and threatened with competition and 
deregulation. 

Network speeds will continue to increase rapidly. Today, the 
NSFNET, the primary high-speed national backbone for the Internet, 
is completing a transition from Tl (1.544 megabits per second [Mb/s]) 
to T3 (45 Mb/s); billions of packets now transit this backbone monthly. 
Advanced Networks and Services (ANS), the corporation formed by IBM 
and MCI to supply services to the NSFNET (among other things), is 
projecting that they will have SONET-level services (probably around 
600 Mb/s) available within the next year or two. Local area networks 
are moving from ethernet (10 Mb/s) and token ring (16 Mb/s) to FDDI 
(100 Mb/s) over optical fiber. The Defense Advance Research Projects 
Agency (DARPA) and the NSF are funding a series of gigabits-per-second 
network testbeds to develop the next generation of technology. The 
NREN programs call for national backbones running at speeds in the 
low gigabits per second later in the 1990s. These backbones, as well 
as new local and metropolitan area network technologies, will build 
on experience gained from the gigabit testbeds. 

After a decade of bumbling, common carriers are seriously entering 
the networking arena in the United States. Historically, the common 
carriers have merely supplied bandwidth in the form of leased lines; 
other organizations built networks by attaching packet switches or 
routers to these lines. Now the common carriers are offering potentially 
useful packet-switched service in the form of Switched Multi-Megabyte 
Data Services (SMDS), which allows transmission in the T1-T3 speed 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 17 



range. In addition, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) 
technology offers two 64 kilobits-per-second (kb/s) channels to homes 
or offices over the existing copper cable plant. Although too little, too 
late for serious interorganizational or intraorganizational networking, 
ISDN technology could offer a considerable improvement in the ability 
to connect homes, small businesses, and other places to the nearest 
terminus of the high-speed national network. The adoption of ISDN 
depends on whether costs are reasonable. (And it appears they will be: 
The early offerings in some states are priced at about $20-$30/month 
for the service on use-insensitive terms within the local service area. 
In other states, tariff proposals have been rejected by state public utility 
commissions because the proposed rates were too high.) 

Following ISDN is the proposed Broadband ISDN (BISDN) service, 
which in the early twenty-first century would offer multi-megabit data 
services on a commodity basis, if it actually becomes available. This 
technology seems to require optical fiber to the end-user premises (at 
the home or office); and in the United States, the development of this 
technology seems linked to public policy questions of whether existing 
cable television franchises or telephone companies will ultimately 
provide high-speed consumer network services. (There are several 
relevant public policy debates that are now receiving attention ranging 
from a bill in Congress for a massive program to install subscriber 
loop fiber optics through a revision of the rulings by Federal Judge 
Harold Green that would allow the RBOCs to enter information content 
marketplaces, thus creating a major new business justification for high- 
speed services.) Other countries, such as Japan, are investing heavily 
in the development of BISDN. The proponents of BISDN come from 
a rather different culture than many of the NREN's current advocates 
in the United States. The orientation is towards very broad-based services 
arising from consumer electronics and entertainment roots. 

Internationally, the situation is more problematic. In many 
countries, high-speed leased lines are still not available within 
reasonable time frames and at reasonable costs, if they are available 
at all. Instead, the common carriers continue to promote national packet- 
switched networks running at relatively low speeds (64 kb/s or less), 
and in some cases these are costly and unreliable. It is also worth noting 
(Paul Peters, personal communication, April 1991) that in much of 
Europe flat-rate telephone service for residences does not exist, which 
implies that connectivity to the network from home via modem is simply 
unaffordable. Thus, although networks are spreading across the globe, 
the ubiquity of connection outside North America is still significantly 
constrained. The European Economic Community (EEC), for example, 
is still discussing how to establish a usable 2 Mb/s international network 
backbone linking its member countries. 



18 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



The explosion of connectivity has a number of implications worth 
mentioning, especially under current pricing schemes, which are not 
usage sensitive (for end-users) and which are distance independent. The 
network disconnects the user from the tyranny of geography and time 
zones and creates electronic client-provider relationships that are distance 
independent as well as international communities of interest that may 
seldom or never meet in person but that share common concerns and 
communicate constantly. Information travels quickly within these 
communities. Connectivity will affect the spread of information about 
scientific discovery or political activities and, as the networks become 
a place to transact commerce, will create a "hot" marketplace where 
price may be set on a per- transaction basis. 

For example, there have been proposals to conduct a marketplace 
in airline seats over the networks (Kuttner, 1989), which would presume 
the ability of the airline computers to calculate nearness to flight time, 
aircraft loading, historical route traffic patterns, and other factors in 
bidding price and which would allow customer computers to request 
the best bid from among all the airlines. Purchasers could choose to 
gamble on low prices at the last minute (due to unsold seats) or hedge 
against rising costs through early purchase. Some purchases might be 
offered preferential treatment a direct extension of current frequent 
flyer programs. Such a market scheme also permits secondary market 
makers to appear for example, speculators attempting to corner all 
airline seats between New York and Los Angeles for the Thanksgiving 
weekend and then reselling these seats. Similar per- transaction models 
might develop for the purchase of information: "hot" authors (for 
example, those being awarded Nobel prizes) and "hot" topics (such 
as those that receive sudden national media attention or papers 
announcing key breakthroughs) might suddenly have their prices hiked 
by a publisher's computer. Of course, the meanings of old commodity- 
oriented terms, such as "cornering the market" and "secondary market 
makers," have yet to be fully defined in a hot networked information 
marketplace. 

Such real-time markets are often unstable and notoriously difficult 
to manage. They are already present, to some extent, in the financial 
sector, where computers operated by the large brokerage houses and 
investment firms conduct "program trading" (a form of computer- 
directed multiexchange, multicommodity arbitrage) in securities and 
other financial instruments. According to some, this type of program 
training has been responsible for at least one major stock market slump 
(Office of Technology Assessment, 1990). 

The increasing internationalization of the networks also may 
produce some unsettling effects. We have moved from markets governed 
by national laws and fixed in place and time (such as stock exchanges) 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 19 



to a 24-hour marketplace built from a concatenation of fixed markets 
across the time zones of the globe, and now these global, continuous 
markets are moving into purely electronic venues, divorced from any 
particular place or locus of regulatory control. 

Import and export controls are rapidly breaking down as intangible 
electronic data and intellectual property move from nation to nation 
across the networks, and taxation of information crossing national 
boundaries seems impractical. Some countries, ominously, are attempting 
to regulate transborder data flow. For example, there are proposals that 
the flow of personal data be prohibited between countries that have 
enacted strong privacy laws and those that have not. Equally important, 
as the international networks develop, it becomes clear that not all 
countries share common cultures and legal understandings. Science- 
fiction writers such as Bruce Sterling (1988) have portrayed the 
development of offshore "data havens" in the third world where 
information that is regulated in first world countries can be stored and 
sold outside of government controls. Some nations do not seem to 
recognize intellectual property the same way in which most first world 
countries do, and perhaps the first data havens will be collections of 
pirated intellectual property rather than dossiers on people and 
organizations developed in contravention of privacy laws. This issue 
is of sufficient concern that it is currently under study by the United 
States Congress Office of Technology Assessment as an extrapolation 
of current problems with, for example, software piracy in Southeast Asia. 

It is interesting to consider possible responses to the development 
of data havens as illustrations of the complexities of the new global 
networked environment. Other than through international diplomacy, 
the only way to prevent use of a data haven is to cut off access to 
the country that hosts these renegade databases and information services. 
Given the operations of the technology underpinning the Internet, 
however, it may be impossible to cut off access selectively to hosts in 
that network. And even isolating a country is very difficult. One can 
imagine the creation of pirate transborder microwave links to 
neighboring countries, shortwave packet radio links, illicit satellite 
uplinks, or any number of hard-to-control international connections. 
The battle to maintain or cut such links amounts to full-scale application 
of technologies developed for electronic warfare jamming, direction 
finding, and low probability of intercept communications. Even the 
legal situation becomes murky. A user in a copyright-recognizing 
country displaying information from a database in a data haven may 
be breaking the laws of the copyright-recognizing country. But, if that 
user exports programs to the data haven to "mine" data stored there 
and only to return certain derived results, the legal status of the user's 
action is unclear (at least to the author). 



20 CLIFFORD A . LYNCH 



Current controversies about cryptographic technology are an 
excellent illustration of the dilemmas that the global networks create. 
It is generally agreed that the computer communications networks are 
frightfully insecure and vulnerable; solving these problems requires 
widespread implementation of advanced cryptographic technologies 
such as public-key cryptosystems. Such technology (much of it simply 
software) is controlled in most countries by law; certainly it is restricted 
for export. History suggests that governments jealously guard the right 
to monitor communications and most of all international com- 
munications; this practice reaches far back into the early days of the 
development of postal systems. Yet securing the networks requires that 
communications be secured with technology that may be sufficiently 
robust to secure it from everyone, including governments. And 
controlling the international proliferation of these technologies is no 
longer a simple matter of customs enforcement when programs can 
be sent from one nation to another across the networks. 

Services (and Other Things) on the Networks 

The purpose of the ARPANET, the now honorably retired initial 
network in the Internet, was to provide shared national access to 
expensive computers. It became clear that it also provided com- 
munication among people who were attached to the network (through 
electronic mail) and the ability to share software and data (through 
file transfer). In the early days, these applications made up the bulk 
of the user traffic on the Internet. The NSFNET, established in the 
mid-1980s, was originally intended to provide national access to high- 
end supercomputers that were located at a handful of NSF-funded 
supercomputer centers and, over time, to other high-end scientific 
equipment (such as specialized, massively parallel processors, telescopes, 
or superconducting supercolliders). Over the life of the Internet, various 
other specialized equipment has also been connected to the network, 
including elevators, soft drink vending machines, and toasters. But the 
service of access to specialized equipment is needed only by a small 
community of users. (Internet appliances, such as toasters, are still exotic 
and expensive, and they are not necessarily shared by large communities.) 

For the majority of users today, the network provides connectivity 
for electronic mail, not access to information services. Yet information 
services are appearing, and users are starting to become aware of their 
existence and are beginning to try to locate and to use them. As users 
adapt to the idea of information services on the network and become 
familiar with the modest, primarily noncommercial, offerings currently 
available, expectations rise, and questions are asked about the 
information services that are not yet available through the network. 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 21 



(The current situation has very important parallels with the introduction 
of the online catalog in libraries, which immediately led the user 
community to demand that the catalog be supplemented with databases 
providing access to the journal literature, source material, more extensive 
bibliographic records, and links to document delivery services.) 
Network-accessible information services, compared with super- 
computers, are of interest to huge numbers of people. They are the 
battlefields of the revolution, and it is in this context that the role 
of libraries is being called into question. 

Consider the information resources available to an Internet user. 
There are perhaps a hundred online library catalogs publicly available 
(St. George, 1992), although access to the all-important journal literature 
abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases mounted as part of some of 
these online library catalogs is blocked since institutions have licensed 
them from database providers. There are a large number of public access 
file transfer archives, containing everything from out-of-copyright books 
in digital form through innumerable computer programs. Although 
these archives are treasure troves, it is enormously difficult to find 
anything in them. 

The archives problem illustrates several interesting developments 
that are likely to become commonplace. Most of the archive files 
available many of which are small or of relatively transient interest, 
such as patches to a given release of a software product are at best 
described by a very brief author abstract. These abstracts do not use 
any type of consistent descriptive scheme or vocabulary. The contents 
of many of the files are programs, which do not lend themselves to 
automated content indexing. Thus, despite some very clever schemes 
such as the Archie FTP (file transfer protocol) archive index at McGill 
University, programs trying to provide access to the archives do not 
have much with which to work. The root problem is that really effective 
access seems to require human intellectual effort to organize and to 
describe the various files available, yet in most cases this effort has 
not been made. In fact, for many files, the value of the file does not 
justify the investment of such human labor. Yet the totality of the files, 
as a collection, is quite valuable and would be made much more so 
by the availability of such access tools. 

There is a wide range of public access campuswide information 
systems (CWISs) that universities and other organizations have made 
available that contain information such as weather data, seminar 
announcements, train schedules, and song lyrics. Government data 
repositories are emerging, and legislation currently under consideration 
may increase the amount of federal government information available 
to the public through the Internet. There are hundreds of listservers 
and network discussion groups, covering everything from public access 



22 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



library systems to virtual reality research, molecular biology to computer 
communications protocols, and public policy to private pleasures (Lynch 
& Preston, 1990). 

What is missing but likely to appear in the next year or two 
are the so-called information utilities (e.g., DIALOG, BRS, and LEXIS) 
and the providers of source material in electronic form (e.g., publishers). 
The services offered by these organizations, unlike the current public 
access services, will be fee based. In many cases, the transactions will 
be between end-users and commercial service providers. In other 
instances, the end-user's institution may provide subsidy as a broker/ 
intermediary or by establishing a site license on behalf of its user 
community. 

The forthcoming availability of these for-profit, fee-based services 
presents a dilemma to the libraries in the network environment. Over 
the past decade, there has been talk of "disintermediation" as users 
become increasingly capable of accessing information directly, thereby 
cutting the library out of the process. In the past, disintermediation 
has been passive the library has been eliminated from the process 
because the user has been able to access information directly, not because 
the user has been blocked from obtaining access to information through 
the library. In the past, libraries did not have a monopoly on information 
access; they offered a relatively efficient, inexpensive means for the user 
to obtain access to information (Pfaffenberger, 1990). In this sense, the 
impact of disintermediation during the 1980s has probably been 
overstated. Many users continued to obtain information through 
intermediaries (either librarians or professional information brokers) 
because they offered good, cost-effective service and because they were 
better than the end-user at gathering relevant information swiftly and 
at reasonable cost. 

In the evolving network environment, however, the equation 
changes. Even those libraries invested in electronic information 
whether as A&I databases or electronic source material are prohibited 
by contract or by copyright from making this information freely 
available to users throughout the network. The end-user must purchase 
information from the information utilities or directly from the 
publishers. At least, the user might persuade his or her primary service 
provider library to license access to the information. But if the user's 
primary library cannot afford to license access or if the publisher will 
not deal with the library, then the end-user is forced to deal directly 
with the information provider. 

If these trends continue, libraries will be displaced from their current 
roles by the networks and the presence of information "owners" on 
the networks. Libraries will continue providing access to paper-based 
information but will be largely blocked from using the new electronic 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 23 



environments for anything but the provision of access to inventories 
of their (increasingly less interesting) paper-based holdings. Barring 
major shifts in position by the information owners or major changes 
in the current structure of intellectual property law, the traditional role 
of the library will be more and more difficult. 

Of course, there are opportunities for libraries to continue serving 
their primary clienteles in the electronic network environment. A library 
acquiring material in electronic form will be able to offer it to members 
of its institutional community. For example, a university library will 
be able to provide access to A&I databases or to licensed electronic source 
material to members of their community. But the current free sharing 
environment of library resources on a national level will be greatly 
constrained. Users will not be able to use the networks to access any 
library independent of geography for resources other than online 
catalogs. And even the institutional library serving the end-user will 
face direct competition from commercial services. 

Particularly threatening is the possibility that the restrictions on 
information transfer in the evolving network environment will 
undermine the long and valuable tradition of interlibrary cooperation 
through such activities as coordinated acquisitions and interlibrary loan. 
The new electronic environments will continue to restrict transfer of 
information from one library to another, and the effect will be to cast 
individual libraries increasingly in isolation. They will end up competing 
with commercial services to support their primary clienteles rather than 
operating within the existing model of a national consortium of libraries 
attempting to provide access to information for each library's patrons. 

The question of user affiliation will become terrifically important. 
With ubiquitous networks undermining geography, a user might 
theoretically seek affiliation with any library on the network or, in 
fact, any set of information providers. Entrepreneurial libraries may 
seek "users" on a national basis; information providers will seek to 
limit the scope of libraries' user communities. This will be a new arena 
of competition among libraries and a new area for negotiation between 
libraries and information providers. 

The issue of clientele will also take on a policy dimension, both 
nationally and internationally. As the electronic distribution and access 
infrastructure becomes established, the marginal cost of adding third 
world nations and public libraries to this infrastructure will be relatively 
small, particularly if these groups only want access to public information 
and older, out-of-copyright data. The question will be whether they 
should be given access on a marginal cost basis. 

As the national networks develop, others will compete with libraries 
for the user's patronage. Organizations such as professional societies 
(who are, technically, nonprofit, but who have become large businesses 



24 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



and subsidize a wide spectrum of activities through their publication 
programs) will become extremely visible and influential as information 
providers. The American Chemical Society is already moving in this 
direction. The American Physics Society has recently issued a report 
from a study group exploring its role in electronic information 
distribution (Loken, 1990; "Task Force," 1991) and envisions the 
development, within the next 20 years, of a massive central physics 
data repository containing published journal literature, bibliographic 
citations, and even experimental data. The word "library" does not 
appear in this vision, which foresees a direct service from the physics 
community to the physics community, eliminating the library as an 
intermediary (other than, perhaps, being the organization that sends 
in the checks to pay for access by academic physicists). Other professional 
societies, usually smaller and with less secure cash flow, have already 
"outsourced" their publications programs to commercial scholarly 
publishers and thus lost control of these publications. 

In counterpoint to the existing commercial and pseudo-commercial 
publishers, a new group of information providers will emerge: the 
nonprofit information providers who place a high value on public 
dissemination of their messages. These will include consumer advocates, 
religious groups of all types, government agencies, and all manner of 
organizations for the public good or organizations simply determined 
to get their message across to the public. These groups, in fact, will 
be eager to subsidize access to their information, in much the same 
way as they subsidize access today through free leaflets and mass mailings. 

The Rise of the End-User Workstation 

End-users are gaining more and more computing power. Within 
the next five years, many scholars and students will develop long-term 
relationships with the workstations that they are already rapidly 
acquiring. Today, we are at the trailing edge of time-shared computing 
economics; some users continue to access networked information 
resources via terminal emulation to an organization information system. 
Their organizationally provided system, in turn, helps them access other 
network resources. Part of the reason for this is that it still is not as 
easy as it should be to access the spectrum of networked information 
resources, and software available for end-user workstations does not 
help as much as it should. Another part of the reason is simply that 
change occurs slowly. 

Within five years, I believe this situation will change radically. 
A user will discuss information needs with software on his or her 
workstation. The workstation will access a range of networked 
information resources (both free and for-fee service), will handle 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 25 



budgeting among these resources, will synthesize information from 
multiple sources, will learn about new resources as they become available 
on the networks, and will perform an active information refining 
function. There will be no need to involve a local, institutionally based 
(e.g., local library-provided) system to access commercial or free services 
on a national and international level. At best, files stored at the local 
library will be just one of many resources accessed by the workstation 
software, although perhaps the cost of using information there will 
be particularly attractive. The independence of the end-user will be 
the ultimate realization of disintermediation. 

The technologies to support such workstation software are already 
in active development. These include workstation-based user agents 
(Buckland, 1990), Z39.50 as a common access mechanism for networked 
information resources (Lynch, 1990a, 1990b, 1991a, 1991b), and plans 
for machine-processable network information resource directories 
(Library of Congress, 1991), along with the necessary billing and 
authentication infrastructure services (Berger & Lynch, 1991). 

Within the context of the rise of end-user workstations, three areas 
need to be addressed: competitive intelligence, multimedia, and user- 
driven scholarly communication. Competitive intelligence (for lack of 
a better phrase) is a major, largely unrecognized issue. Multimedia and 
end-user scholarly publishing are, in my opinion, overly promoted 
potential results of the workstation transition. 

Competitive Intelligence 

We have discussed "hot" marketplaces made possible by the 
networks. In a world where end-user workstations negotiate with 
networked information servers to access current information, some users 
need to know what information other users are seeking. Just as today 
we are beginning to see credit card companies mining their databases 
for salable information (for example, American Express might gain a 
considerable return on a finely targeted mailing list of people who spend 
more than $20,000 per year on airline tickets and who spend less than 
$1,000 per year on United Airlines), one can imagine DIALOG selling 
attributed searches in chemical databases by pharmaceutical cor- 
porations. There might be two rates: one where the searches are 
confidential, and one where the searches are available for purchase by 
the competitive intelligence af termarket. 

This world rapidly comes to resemble the old "spy-vs.-spy" and 
"spy-vs.-spy-vs.-spy" comics in MAD Magazine. One can imagine a 
pharmaceutical company commissioning the development of a computer 
program that deliberately searches large databases under the "resale 
permitted rates" and submits searches that, when analyzed by the 
competition, deliberately leads competitors down blind research alleys. 



26 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



In a world of network-based information seeking, information and 
disinformation about information seeking are fungible commodities. 

One can imagine as well the development of software that exploits 
information about who is searching what, and information that becomes 
more valuable as it becomes clear that more people are accessing it. 
Consider visions such as the Worldnet portrayed by David Brin (1990) 
in his recent novel Earth, in which users can configure personal 
information triggers: Show me news items in Category X that have 
been accessed by more than 1 percent of the network users in the past 
twelve hours. Such networks become complex, dynamic social and 
economic systems, incorporating elaborate feedback mechanisms and 
are subject to all manner of manipulation. 

The full effects of point-of-sale (POS) tracking technology the 
now ubiquitous bar code scanners in supermarkets, bookstores, record 
stores, and similar establishments are just now becoming apparent. 
In the period during which this paper was written, two major milestones 
were reached. Supermarkets began to accept credit cards (at least in 
California) on a broad basis, permitting the collection of extraordinarily 
detailed data on the purchasing habits of anyone using a credit card 
at the supermarket. And Billboard, which tracks sales of recorded music, 
converted to POS data in the midst of considerable controversy over 
the fact that some very large record stores were not yet providing POS 
data to the firm that licenses this information from the stores, processes 
it, and resells it both to Billboard and to the major recording companies 
(for hundreds of thousands of dollars per company per year). The amount 
of very timely, very detailed data now available to track both market 
movements and individual purchasing habits for consumer goods will 
have an enormous effect on marketing and advertising as companies 
learn to exploit it, and a number of information brokers and refiners 
will profit handsomely as they help to gather and exploit these data. 
As the acquisition or use of information becomes more transactional, 
similar trends and players are likely to emerge. Circulation data may 
be a valuable and salable commodity for libraries (hopefully with 
appropriate privacy safeguards); sales data for acquisition on demand 
systems may become equally valuable (and will less likely contain the 
privacy safeguards we might like). If you use a credit card, "they" already 
know, or can know, for the cost of some computing cycles, a great 
deal about the books and recorded music you choose to acquire. 

Bob Lucky 's (1989) picture of executive workstations trading office 
gossip about who's getting raises, who's getting fired, and who's sleeping 
with whom on behalf of their owners may seem not only farfetched, 
but funny (at least the way Lucky tells it); but all it really requires 
is a program imbued with a bit more personality and ambition. Most 
of the data are already there. 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 27 



Multimedia 

The development potential of multimedia information as 
workstations proliferate has received much attention. This may in fact 
be chimerical: Multimedia require the author to be an orchestrator, movie 
director, scriptwriter, graphic artist, etc. Most multimedia today are built 
upon the recycling of existing musical scores, films, and images, 
generally in total violation of copyright laws. It seems likely that the 
costs of multimedia content development/acquisition will restrict 
development of new, "legal" multimedia to a handful of very broad- 
based entertainments (some with educational importance, much like 
today's public television programs). The average scientific com- 
municator may be unable to develop readily legal multimedia products 
for distribution over the network, having neither the time, the skills, 
nor the licenses for components to be integrated into a multimedia 
work. 

As an educational medium, multimedia will probably have greatest 
impact at the elementary to high school levels where large numbers 
of students study the same material, which changes very little from 
year to year. Here the unit cost of elaborate multimedia "textbooks" 
is reasonable. These costs will likely even be acceptable for introductory 
college courses, but it is hard to believe that it will be cost effective 
for advanced graduate texts and research monographs. In these areas 
(excepting the occasional "jewel" a scholar's lifework, perhaps 
subsidized by a large grant), only modest use of sophisticated multimedia 
seems likely to occur in most disciplines, at least without a major 
revolution in authoring tools and the creation of large public domain 
sound, image, and video databases that can be used as source components. 
For routine scientific communication, text, still images, computer 
programs, data files, and perhaps modest amounts of audio (recorded 
voice) will define the scope of multimedia. The files generated by users 
of the NeXT multimedia mail system probably give a good sense of 
the level of sophistication we can expect. 

A second aspect of multimedia is the problem of access to existing 
multimedia collections, such as film and television archives, and to 
new multimedia content that will be developed. Here, the prospects 
are equally grim. Consider a resource such as the University of California 
Los Angeles film and television archives. A scholar today could spend 
a lifetime mining a tiny part of the riches of such a collection. We 
do not know how to index movies or television programs for effective 
access, and technology will probably not provide a solution soon. Even 
in the more limited domain of paintings or photographs, despite the 
vast expenditure of resources by organizations such as the Getty Art 
History Information Program and the contributions of some very fine 
thinkers on the subject, we have only a superficial understanding of 



28 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



how to describe (index or catalog) a great painting, and most of the 
thinking to date has not been tested in a real-world environment of 
public access to large databases. Thus, it seems likely that effective 
intellectual access to multimedia resources will remain a major missing 
link long after these resources become accessible (in that one can view 
or transfer them, if one knows what one is seeking) across the network. 

Personal Scholarly Publishing 

Some who envision the future of networked information foresee 
the potential of each scholar to be a publisher. A user could store files 
of important research results on a workstation and advertise the 
availability of these files on the network, thus bypassing the existing 
apparatus of scholarly publishing. Scholarly information would thus 
be freely available. Libraries might develop new roles helping scholars 
to become publishers and providing catalogs of available information. 

There is a basic fallacy in these visions, however, that must be 
addressed bluntly. For the purposes of tenure and promotion (a primary 
motive for scholars to publish), acceptance of a paper by a major scholarly 
journal is essential. Even if promotion or tenure is not at stake, 
professional reputation often is based on publication in the "right" 
journals. Transfer of copyright to the publisher a professional society 
or a commercial publisher is a basic condition of publication. There 
is a vicious circle here. Until personal publication on the network is 
viewed as having equal value as "legitimate" scholarly publication, 
only a few visionaries will practice it. Copyright will continue to be 
the major tool for restricting access to information by the commercial 
or quasi-commercial (professional society) publishing community, and 
libraries increasingly will be left out of the cycle. 

Furthermore, those who do self-publish will risk obscurity for 
another reason: Nobody will be able to find their work. In a growing 
torrent of publication, increasingly elaborate A&I databases will become 
a primary resource for locating important literature (along with 
traditional methods, such as citations in other works and word of mouth). 
Currently, A&I databases play an important role in continuing to 
legitimize and affirm the status of the primary scholarly journals. It 
is philosophically unlikely and economically perhaps infeasible for these 
A&I services to cover an infinity of self-published literature, unless one 
postulates extensive changes in the way these services do business. For 
a fee, the author might submit a document to one of these services 
for review, and if the service favorably reviews it, then the citation to 
the work on the author's workstation would be published in the database. 
But, in such a world, the A&I service itself begins to function very 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 29 



like a journal with page charges. And it is only a small step, then, 
to having the A&I database demand rights to act as a distributor of 
the accepted documents. 

In summary, I view the rise of the end-user workstation as the 
development of a very sophisticated access device to networked 
information resources and a potential disintermediator for libraries. As 
more and more access becomes electronic, new information markets 
(such as competitive intelligence) will develop, much as the extensive 
conversion of financial markets to electronic transactions (for example, 
the adoption of credit cards by consumers) has created (and continues 
to create) a myriad of new information markets since the 1960s. I do 
not think the workstation is a major tool for shifting the locus of control 
or ownership of information although I would like to be proven wrong. 
Although sophisticated multimedia will be available on the networks 
and viewed on workstations, it will be less common and more costly 
than many people expect. And unsophisticated media are likely to be 
oversold in terms of their impact. 

The Development of the Information Refiner 

Almost everyone depends on information for some aspect of their 
personal or professional life for example, for scholarship, business 
strategy, investments, or health and, in all fields of endeavor, the 
information user is about to be swept away by a swelling flood of 
information. There are many causes: the growth in human knowledge 
and publication, the increasing use of electronic media, the increasing 
internationalization of many aspects of commerce and scholarship, the 
development of round-the-clock financial markets, the proliferation of 
sensor systems, and the development of computer-based tools that can 
exploit real-time or near-real-time information and take action upon it. 

Services that can filter, sort, organize, and prioritize this information 
flood will develop in all fields in this decade. They will not, typically, 
create information; rather they will distill information into knowledge 
by collecting it from multiple sources, correlating it, and evaluating 
it. It seems likely that, by the turn of the century, many information 
seekers will deal with these new secondary services rather than with 
primary information suppliers. Implementations of such services will 
range from purely automated systems for example, a program that 
scans newswires and uses a combination of keyword matching and 
superficial linguistic analysis to extract news items that fit a user's 
interest profile to purely human-based systems perhaps as simple as 
weekly recommended readings sold by major authorities in research 
fields or abstracting and summarizing services in narrowly focused 
subject areas. (In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge growth in costly, 



30 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



specialized newsletters tracking developments in various fields of finance 
and technology; in the 1990s, these newsletters will evolve into network- 
based real-time services.) 

In scholarly publishing, the issue will be not so much whether 
one can get an article published but whether a scholar can convince 
the various information refiners to present it to the community as worth 
reading. In some ways, this resembles the current situation where the 
scholarly journals function as "gatekeepers," but the new information 
refiners are likely to be quite different in character from the peer reviewers 
of today's scholarly journals, in ways that we do not yet fully understand. 
If nothing else, they are liable to be far more selective in their ratings 
of information and far less concerned with academic and professional 
courtesies. 



ACCESS TO INFORMATION: THE RICH AND THE POOR 

Sol Yurick (1985) authored an extremely important, but little-known 
meditation on the social, political, and cabalistic implications of the 
new electronic world, Behold Metatron: The Recording Angel, which 
should be required reading for anyone concerned with the new electronic 
technologies. He argues that if information becomes the new coin of 
the realm, then not all information will be available to everyone. In 
fact, information will be more tightly held and more dearly sold. We 
are not entering an age of universal wealth. There will still be the 
rich and the poor. To be sure, there will be more information than 
ever, with a wider range of prices than ever. Some information will 
be cheap and readily available but it may not have much value. This 
point is often overlooked in discussions about the possible roles of 
libraries in the future world of electronic computer networks. Consider 
the three major sectors of libraries in the new universe of pervasive 
electronic information. 

Academic (Research) Libraries 

The challenge for these institutions will be to provide excellent 
service to their primary clientele in an environment of competition 
from information brokers, commercial publishers, and professional 
societies. They will succeed to the extent that they can subsidize access 
to information for which the user would otherwise have to pay and 
to the extent that they can add value by organizing, selecting, and refining 
the commercial offerings (a point discussed in the next section). 

The great research libraries will face other dilemmas. Due to 
restrictions on licensed electronic information, they will be less able 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 31 



to act as the libraries of last resort standing behind public libraries, 
special libraries, and smaller academic libraries. For older (out-of- 
copyright) information, because networks will facilitate faster 
information transfer, smaller libraries will discard collections choosing 
instead, in the face of growing budgetary pressures, to rely on a few 
major research libraries to fill requests, thus transferring the cost burden 
to these few large libraries. (And these large repository libraries will 
increasingly recharge their real costs for servicing interlibrary loan 
requests.) This trend is already apparent as libraries respond to serials 
costs increases by canceling subscriptions and relying on interlibrary 
loan, but in the future, this approach will become less effective as 
publishers constrain transfer from one library to another through 
licenses to electronic information. 

Furthermore, the nature of the great research library is twofold, 
and increasingly the two aspects are in opposition. The great research 
library should offer superlative service to its clientele that is, access 
to information and help in locating and obtaining information. But 
also, the great research library houses a great collection including 
things that nobody wants now but that may be critical to future scholars' 
understanding of the world of today. The very notion of collection is 
under numerous pressures in a world that is moving to electronic 
information. There is the sheer proliferation of material (e.g., print, 
electronic discussion lists, radio programs, television programs, movies, 
computer games, and recorded music). And there is the fact that as 
information rightsholders move from public law (copyright) and sale 
to license (contract law) for electronic information, the library does 
not actually own anything it merely has a license to a set of electronic 
material for a fixed period of time after which it must pay more 
license fees. 

The material of scholarship is not always economically viable. A 
publisher housing material on a network server for acquisition on 
demand may find, after a certain period of time, that the usage rate 
on this material is so low that it is not cost effective to keep it accessible 
on the network. As the cost of computing and storage drops, the crossover 
point will shift, but if the material is not used, eventually it will not 
be cost effective to keep it available for sale. The publisher is then 
liable to take the information electronically "out of print." In a license 
environment, no library will necessarily "own" a copy of this material 
to preserve its availability for future scholars. Mechanisms are needed 
to ensure that copies of such materials are maintained for future access 
if not by publishers subject to the economic constraints of profitmaking 
corporations, then by libraries subsidized for the public good. And 
simply devising a code of "good behavior" for publishers on the network, 
which suggests that they submit materials they are taking "out-of-print" 



32 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



to some library-financed repository, may not be sufficient to preserve 
the continuity of the scholarly record. 

Special Libraries 

Some special libraries will behave much like narrowly focused 
academic research libraries; the rest will become irrelevant. In fact, it 
will be increasingly hard to distinguish the successful special library 
of the future from an academic research library in terms of services 
offered to the user community, except that special libraries will support 
a more limited set of disciplines than a university library and perhaps 
support them in more depth. 

Special libraries may find that they have another new advantage 
over the larger general research libraries. Some information vendors 
or refiners may choose not to sell to public or large academic libraries 
(or to sell only at impossibly high prices) because the value of their 
information is in its scarcity, and they are unwilling to dilute the value 
over the large user communities of larger libraries. But they may be 
willing to market to special libraries (for example, those supporting 
corporate research and development efforts) because they know that 
the information will remain closely held. Again, the beginnings of this 
trend are already visible: Corporate libraries regularly acquire expensive 
research reports and newsletters; these are not commonly found in 
academic libraries. It is unclear whether this is because of the high 
cost of the material or because the information suppliers do not want 
to sell to the academic and public library sectors. Certainly, the 
information vendors are not marketing to these groups and are not 
making their materials easy to acquire for example, they are not 
working much with the jobbers that service most major libraries. 

Public Libraries 

The future for this sector of the library community is the most 
perilous. Many smaller public libraries will be reduced to lending current 
novels and will be unable to fill other information needs for their user 
communities. They will have neither the funding nor the expertise to 
operate as intermediaries to electronic information, either as access 
subsidizers or refiners. In some ultimate sense, of course, public libraries 
are not endangered: Although scholarly information may migrate 
relatively quickly to electronic form, popular novels and self-help books 
will persist in paper form indefinitely, and thus the economics of shared 
acquisitions and lending for this material will continue to be viable 
indefinitely. The issue is the size of the constituency that the public 
libraries will be able to serve. 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 33 



The general public will become increasingly information poor. 
Aside from those users who can affiliate with some academic or special 
library with the funding to underwrite their access to information, the 
general public will have to fund their own access to information or 
lose access altogether. 

Ken Dowlin (1990) of the San Francisco Public Library uses the 
slogan "Ignorance kills" to emphasize the importance of public libraries 
as providers of information, particularly to those otherwise disen- 
franchised. He speaks of access to information about health, finances, 
community services, and educational opportunities. But, realistically, 
what quality of information in these areas will libraries be able to license 
and provide? 

One often thinks of public libraries as primarily serving the adult 
populace, but they also fill other key roles, such as supporting primary 
and secondary school students and local businesses. It is in these areas 
that access to electronic information will be most essential to the health 
of commerce and education in the community, and the public library 
will face massive problems. Research libraries will be less able to be 
the provider of last resort for the public libraries due to the license 
restrictions already discussed. In addition, seekers of information will 
face a discontinuity that is already growing visible, leaving the public 
libraries to stand or fall on their own, increasingly meager, resources. 

The currently available sources of health and medical information 
illustrate this discontinuity. It seems likely that some relatively low- 
cost "general public" databases will be developed for the mass market, 
perhaps at the level of current popular press articles on medical and 
health matters; some prototypes are already available, targeted for public 
library markets. But an information seeker wishing to delve even a little 
deeper is immediately confronted by a huge chasm: The next step is 
a very costly, complex, sophisticated database such as MEDLINE, 
which, if the user has access to information only through a public library, 
is unlikely to be available unless that user purchases access personally. 
And, even if such access is purchased, there are the dual problems of 
obtaining the source material located through such a database as 
interlibrary loan becomes increasingly constrained by electronic 
information licensing and of simply understanding the citation 
information availability through a "specialist"-oriented database like 
MEDLINE. The same problem appears in many other fields. There 
is no longer a smooth transition from information intended for the 
layperson to that aimed at the specialist. And electronic information 
will be more complex than today's paper-based materials. 

The library that flourishes in the 1990s will have to walk a tightrope 
across competing demands (each of which can absorb a near-infinite 
amount of money) to 



34 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



1. continue to acquire "traditional" paper-based information; 

2. acquire or provide (subsidize) access to electronic versions of the 
existing paper-based reference works, journal subscriptions, and 
similar materials; 

3. acquire or provide (subsidize) access to A&I databases that provide 
access to the journal literature materials held by the library as well 
as those available through interlibrary loan or document supply 
services, and existing both in paper and electronic forms; 

4. acquire or provide (subsidize) access to new electronic-only forms 
of information: e.g., listserves, netnews, multimedia publications, 
numeric databases, weather information, factual databases; and 

5. acquire, develop, or provide (subsidize) access to the information 
refinery services evaluative, correlative, and filtering services to 
control the flood of information generated by the first four demands. 

A successful library in the 1990s must address all of these areas. The 
balance achieved will depend on the library's mission, as viewed by 
its management, and on the demands of its constituency. The library 
management must recognize that consensus is unlikely to emerge from 
the user community demands. User communities may fragment instead 
into competing factions with opposing agendas. And the most discontent 
of the factions, particularly if they are not advocates of expanding paper- 
based archives, will be fair game to competitors to the institutional 
library that will populate the networks. 



CONCLUSION: NEW ROLES FOR LIBRARIES IN A 
WORLD OF NETWORKED INFORMATION 

The traditional library mission has four major components: 

1. to select and acquire information, 

2. to house and preserve information, 

3. to organize information, and 

4. to provide access to information. 

Compare this list of traditional functions to the pressures on the library 
of the 1990s enumerated above. The demand for acquisition now 
generalized to encompass both traditional purchase and provision of 
access (via purchase-on-demand agreements or fast interlibrary loan) 
predominates. The archival functions are overlooked. In a sense, the 
archival role is sacrificed to the marginal pricing advantages of provision 
of access for the great research libraries. As acquisition becomes more 
user driven, the library's role in selecting a long-term collection is 
reduced. Further, more and more of the traditional library role in 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 35 



information organization at least as it is understood today is carried 
by copy cataloging and the purchase of A8cl databases. 

But there are new roles for libraries that combine elements of the 
four traditional missions. Libraries can play a vital role through 
evaluation and selection: They can choose information refiners, or they 
can, themselves, be information refiners. 

Making the transition will require that libraries become much more 
comfortable in evaluating and determining the value of information. 
Historically, libraries' acquisitions decisions have basically been made 
based on information evaluation, but beyond acquisitions, they have 
assigned equal value to all information. There are many prototypes 
in progress that define librarians in new roles as information organizers, 
refiners, and evaluators, offering services ranging from low-cost, low- 
technology, but highly effective, review services, such as Current Cites 
at the University of California, Berkeley, which provides brief alerts 
of new and important publications in library and information science 
fields, through the costly, complex, sophisticated Knowledge 
Management process pioneered by Nina Matheson and Richard Lucier 
at Johns Hopkins University (Lucier, 1987, 1990). Unfortunately, for 
every project that involves libraries, there seem to be several that do not. 

The central issue for libraries is how they can add sufficient value 
to guarantee their continued role in a world transfigured by 
information technology, ubiquitous computer networks, and massive 
disintermediation. Simply purchasing a role by subsidizing in- 
formation access will not be enough in the long term, unless it saves 
a great deal of money for the institution. For institutional managers, 
increasingly concerned with short-term popularity, current fashions 
like "empowerment" in this case, being used to justify the transfer 
of funds directly to the end-users and allowing them to purchase 
information from any supplier on the network will have great appeal 
(and will attract great support from the end-user community), even 
though much of the library's archival function will be sacrificed in 
the process. Why preserve continuity of the scholarly record when 
the alternatives are tangibly reduced costs and empowered, happy end- 
users? It is possible to draw some comparisons to the restructuring 
of corporate America that has occurred in the past two decades? The 
focus on short-term profitability has, in some sense, led to an efficient 
corporate world, but one that promises serious weaknesses in long- 
term competitiveness and the development of the industrial and 
research base in the United States. 

There are several areas in which libraries can add intellectual value. 
Information evaluation and filtering have already been discussed as has 
the creation of new information (often through partnerships with 
researchers) that the library can sell, broker, or otherwise control, thus 



36 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



placing the library in the role of primary information provider rather 
than simply as an information intermediary. Two other major roles 
are obvious. The library can organize and integrate the complex and 
fragmented information access environment. The beginnings of this 
role are apparent in the efforts of various librarians to help their 
communities navigate the Internet and employ the various information 
resources. Finally, libraries can continue to earn a role perhaps an 
expanded one as information intermediaries. It is true that more 
information is end-user-accessible and that the access software is 
becoming easier to use. At the same time, the total amount of information 
available is growing very rapidly, and some of it is complex and difficult 
to search and evaluate. Some libraries may forge effective partnerships 
with researchers as specialists in gathering information to support the 
research enterprise. If the libraries as institutions fail to do so, 
entrepreneurial librarians will move out of the existing library 
organizations in ever greater numbers to become part of research 
activities directly. This new breed of information specialists will combine 
deep area expertise with skills in information management, searching, 
evaluation, and organization. 

Revolutions are times when the unthinkable becomes possible. One 
need only consider the changes that have occurred in the financial and 
commercial worlds since the introduction of networks and information 
technology to see the extent of the unthinkable changes that can, in 
fact, occur seemingly overnight. (To see a marvelous example of such 
changes, consider the trajectory of the House of Morgan from 1930 
to 1989 [Chernow, 1990] from the most conservative of investment 
bankers to one of the most aggressive participants in the hostile takeover 
frenzy of the late 1980s.) Recent political events have also reacquainted 
us with revolutions. Who, a mere two years ago, would have predicted 
not only the liberation of Eastern Europe but also the breakup of the 
Soviet Union? The unthinkable can, in fact, happen, sometimes more 
swiftly than most of us want to believe. Existing institutions must 
rejustify their roles and value to their constituencies in the face of new 
alternatives for those constituencies. This is precisely the challenge that 
the network information revolution is creating for the institution of 
the library. 



A POSTSCRIPT: TRAINING FUTURE 
INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS 

The keynote speech that was the basis of this paper was made at 
a conference sponsored by one of the leading schools of library and 
information science. Many of those present at the conference were 
educators and students. Thus, in closing, it seems appropriate to focus 



NETWORKED INFORMATION 37 



briefly on the future role of the library schools in the new world of 
networked information. 

Although the role of libraries may be in doubt, I believe that there 
will be an enlarged demand for information specialists. (I do not think 
the term "librarian" is appropriate any more, although what are now 
called "library" schools may well serve as training grounds for many 
of these professionals.) In this sense, library schools may look forward 
to a promising future, if they rise to the challenge. Emerging fields 
such as medical informatics and large-scale scientific data management 
offer opportunities for library schools to expand and refocus their roles 
(perhaps through joint programs with other departments) in training 
the specialists that will be needed in the future. Following behind these 
immature, but now well-established disciplines, are new fields of study 
that as yet have no defined names but that deal with information, 
networks, and advanced computing technology. It is interesting that 
at many institutions, existing departments of computer science have 
not focused strongly on these new areas. 

At the same time, a massive overhaul of library school curricula 
will be needed if these institutions are to produce graduates who can 
contribute to and thrive within the changed world described in this 
paper. Furthermore, this curriculum will have to be taught not only 
prospectively to people entering the field but retroactively to large 
numbers of established library and information professionals. This 
curriculum must include a comprehensive coverage of the various 
technologies fueling the revolution advanced user interfaces, mass 
media, computer networks, and database technology. It must include 
study of the exploration and uses of information resources, which needs 
to be coupled with study of information organization and use, but from 
a perspective founded more on basic theory than on the mechanics 
of today's practices. (An excellent recent book illustrating the shift in 
emphasis I believe is needed is Michael Buckland's [1991] Information 
and Information Systems.) Finally, many students will also need to gain 
thorough knowledge of one or more applications disciplines medicine, 
meteorology, finance. 

This is not to say that the current, rather vocationally oriented 
courses need to be abolished, any more than the networked information 
revolution will lead to the abolition of all libraries as we know them. 
But the world will become more segmented, and the demand for 
traditional librarians will follow the diminished role and importance 
of libraries that remain staunchly traditional. Library schools, as 
institutions, need to decide whether they will look to the past or to 
the future. And, if the schools look to the future, they and their graduates 
will play a central role whether or not libraries as institutions manage 
to rise to the challenges of the networked information revolution. The 



38 CLIFFORD A. LYNCH 



winners of the network information revolution, be they libraries or 
new institutions that develop to supplant them, will require a new 
breed of information specialists. The library schools are the obvious 
training ground for these professionals. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I thank Brett Sutton and Chuck Davis at the Graduate School of Library 
and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
for patiently waiting for this very late paper, and Cecilia Preston for reviewing 
and discussing innumerable drafts and for her notes on the original (impromptu) 
keynote address from which this paper was constructed. I also thank Michael 
Buckland for his very valuable comments on an earlier draft. And I thank 
Nancy Gusack for her editorial assistance. 



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PAUL EVAN PETERS 

Director, Coalition for Networked Information 
Washington, DC 



Networked Information Resources and Services: 

Next Steps on the Road to the Distributed 
Digital Libraries of the Twenty-first Century* 



ABSTRACT 

The aim of this paper is to generate discussion about and reflection 
on what is meant by networked information resources and services and 
to provide a practical appreciation for what currently constitutes these 
relatively new information resources and services and how they will 
likely evolve as the 1990s unfold. In addition, the author hopes to convey 
some of the excitement that a growing number of information 
technologists and librarians are beginning to feel about networked 
information resources and services and to suggest how the efforts of 
those information technologists and librarians can be orchestrated for 
mutual benefit with the efforts of a host of other concerned and 
materially affected parties. 



INTRODUCTION 

The often-predicted and long-awaited transition from information 
distribution and access by exclusively print means to information 
distribution and access by electronic as well as print means now depends 
upon a variety of institutional, organizational, and marketplace 



Another version of this paper was published in CAUSE/EFFECT, Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer 
1991. 



40 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 41 



"readiness factors" more than it does upon any specific technological 
innovation and development. 

It is extremely important to place the contemporary scene in the 
context provided by the approximately fifty-year effort to marshal 
information technology to the service of scholarship and pedagogy. 
Doing so helps us to keep in mind what this long-term effort is really 
about. It is not about "electronic libraries," "virtual libraries," or even 
"distributed digital libraries." These popular and evocative phrases say 
something about the technological and service architectures that shape 
the efforts and aspirations of contemporary information technologists 
and librarians, but they say nothing about what really motivates those 
efforts. The mission of all of these efforts, no matter how technologically 
or bibliographically esoteric they may appear to be, is to improve 
information distribution and access by using high-performance 
computers and advanced networks to support research and education 
communication. 



ADVANCED NETWORKS 

So why are so many information technologists and librarians so 
excited about advanced networks in general and about BITNET, the 
National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), the global Internet, 
and the proposed National Research and Education Network in 
particular? What's the big deal? There are three basic reasons for this 
excitement: simplification, connectivity, and performance. 

Simplification 

First of all, an advanced network provides a common framework 
by which to interconnect and to interoperate the great variety of highly 
heterogeneous departmental, institutional, regional, and other 
individual networks that have sprung up by one means or another over 
the past twenty years or so. This interconnection and interoperation 
results in a major technological simplification of the global networking 
scene and in the reduced costs and the increased values that always 
accompany such simplifications. 

Connectivity 

The second reason is that the connectivity provided by these 
advanced networks is expanding at a truly fantastic rate. It is becoming 
progressively easier and more cost effective to connect research and 
education communities to each other and to the growing variety of 



42 



PAUL EVAN PETERS 



resources and services to which they contribute and on which they 
depend. One specific indicator of this phenomenon is provided by the 
growth of the NSFNET (Figure 1). 



National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) 

Number of foreign, regional, state, and local networks January 1991 



3000 



2500 



MILNET Networks 
explicitly confiaured for the 




Jan 89 Jan 90. 



. Jan 91 

NSFNET 



Figure 1 
Merit Network, Inc. 1991 



As of January 31, 1991, 2,338 individual networks, including 688 
foreign networks, can be reached through the NSFNET. In the past 
two years, the total number of individual networks that can be reached 
by this means has increased by 675 percent, while the number of foreign 
networks that can be reached through the network has increased by 
over 2,000 percent. No one knows precisely how many individual 
computers are interconnected by these networks or how many individual 
users are served by those computers, but an educated guess is 200,000 
computers and 10,000,000 users. This is an impressive amount of 
connectivity, and it is increasing at an equally impressive rate. 

Another view of the simplification and connectivity being offered 
by these advanced networks is provided by what they promise for library 
functions and interfaces. Figure 2 provides a simplified conceptu- 
alization of typical library functions and how these functions interface 
with a variety of external agencies and actors. For instance, the diagram 
shows, at six o'clock, that patrons interface with the library's reference 
staff and system, the library's catalog and information resources, and 
the library's circulation and interlibrary loan staff and systems; it also 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 



43 



UMCP Libraries Information Technology Division 



Typical Library Functions & Interfaces [ 




Figure 2 
( Diagram courtesy of Ron Larsen, University of Maryland) 



shows, at eleven o'clock, that the library's acquisitions staff and system 
interface with publishers, brokers, and other information resources. 

Figure 3 observes that a variety of networking technologies are 
already being used to enhance the effectiveness and increase the efficiency 
of these interfaces. For instance, it shows, at between nine and ten o'clock, 
that private networks are being used to interface the library's cataloging 
staff and system with bibliographic networks such as the Research 
Libraries Information Network and OCLC; it also shows, at seven 
o'clock, that the library's reference staff and system interface with services 
such as DIALOG and LEXIS primarily using commercial networks. 

The third and final diagram in this series, Figure 4, shows how 
a contemporary advanced network, shown as the large "U" that provides 
a setting for all the functions and a framework for all the interfaces 
of the library, can simplify the technological characteristics of existing 
interfaces while increasing the number of connections that exist among 
the full range of library functions and between the library functions 
and the full range of external agencies and actors. 



44 



PAUL EVAN PETERS 



Performance 

Performance is the third reason why information technologists and 
librarians are so excited about these advanced networks. Performance 
levels are already mind-boggling and promise to be dumbfounding by 
1995, if not sooner. Again, the NSFNET provides an object lesson (Figure 
5). In January 1991, the network transported 5.87 billion packets of 
information that averaged approximately 350 characters each. This 
impressive figure becomes all the more so when one considers that it 
represents a 237 percent growth in traffic transported by the network 
in the single year that ended in January 1991, a compound growth 
rate for the year that averaged 20 percent per month. No one knows 
precisely how much traffic is transported within but not between the 
individual networks that are interconnected by the NSFNET, but most 
analysts believe that a ten-to-one ratio is a fair estimate. This estimate 
implies that in January 1991 alone, nearly 60 billion packets of 
information were transported within the networks that are inter- 
connected by the NSFNET. This is a mind-boggling level of 
performance. Once again, theory predicts an exponential shape to this 



UMCP Libraries - Information Technology Division 



Library Networking - 1991 j 



Dedicated Lines 
to Brokers 




Figure 3 
(Diagram courtesy of Ron Larsen, University of Maryland) 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 



45 



Target Network Architecture | Regional 

^^^^^^^^^i^HH^^H^^^^HHH^H^^^^H Atj*.i..L, 



Cataloging / Catalog ^\ Collection 

Management 




Figure 4 
(Diagram courtesy of Ron Larsen, University of Maryland) 



curve. Once again, we are clearly in the early stages of this growth 
process, or the growth process is being constrained by resources. And 
once again, both implications are true. 

One way to try to grasp what these levels of performance mean 
and will mean to research and education communities is to pose the 
question of how many typewritten pages can be transported at a variety 
of illustrative performance levels. Some relatively straightforward 
quantitative assumptions lead to some very interesting results. For 
instance, if we assume that there are 200 words on a typical typewritten 
page, that each word has 10 letters, and that each letter requires 10 
bits to encode, then we can conclude that it takes 20,000 bits to encode 
a typewritten page. These numbers can be used to generate Table 1. 

Starting with the first line of Table 1, we see that a performance 
level of 2.4 kilo (thousand) bits per second (kb/s), also known as 2400 
baud, enables just over a tenth of a typewritten page to be transported 
each second. This is the performance level of most contemporary 
personal computer modems and circuits when they operate at perfect 
efficiency. The third line of this table indicates that a performance level 
of 1.5 mega (million) bits per second (Mb/s) enables 75 typewritten 



46 



PAUL EVAN PETERS 



TABLE 1 
PERFORMANCE LEVEL EXAMPLES 



Performance Level 



Transportation Rate 



2.40 kb/s 


0.12p/s 


9.60 kb/s 


0.48 p/s 


1.50 Mb/s 


75.00 p/s 


45.00 Mb/s 


2,250.00 p/s 


500.00 Mb/s 


25,000.00 p/s 


1.00 Gb/s 


50,000.00 p/s 



6 billion - 
5 billion - 
4 billion - 
3 billion - 
2 billion - 
1 billion - 


NSFNET Monthly Traffic in Pac 

January 
5.87 bi 

January 1991 traffic represents a 237% 
increase over January 1 990 

January 1 990 _ n ~ * 
2.47 billion \^ ft p| |:':| f-:| p| 


k6 

19 
lio 


* 

31 
n 


> 


- 


-> 


i 




nnnnr 


i- r-i ^ ;; 




;,; 


> 


;> 


< 






; 


;> 








-> 




V 


> 






; 


: ; ; 


/ 


; s : 






:; 




'-- 












% 


LJ)LJ|LJ|liil|L I|L1|I. 
Ian 


I|LJ|I l|L,J|^J|l-l[l i1|L .l| ,..-| , 1 1 | 1--| | | | 

> Jan ^ x 


Jan 
91 
FT 


89 


90 

NSFN 



Figure 5 
Merit Network, Inc. 1991 



pages to be transported each second. This is the performance level of 
most contemporary network controllers and circuits operating at perfect 
efficiency. Finally, the last line indicates that a performance level of 
1 giga (billion) bits per second (Gb/s) enables 50,000 typewritten pages 
to be transported each second. This will be the performance level of 
the network controllers and circuits that will be in production use in 
1995, if not sooner, when they operate at perfect efficiency. 

The meaning of these performance levels can be made clearer still 
by considering the case of a personal library of 2,000 books. If one 
assumes that the typical book starts life as a 1,000-page typewritten 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 47 



manuscript, then it would take this personal library 40 seconds to be 
transported at 1 Gb/s. It would take a typical academic library of 
1,000,000 books 6 hours to be transported at 1 Gb/s. It would take a 
relatively large research library of 5,000,000 books 1.25 days to be 
transported at 1 Gb/s. There are many analysts who believe that it 
is a much better than fifty-fifty proposition that by 1995 we will achieve 
production performance levels of 3 Gb/s rather than 1 Gb/s. This is 
a dumbfounding technological prospect; no one fully understands what 
it will mean for research and education communities. 



ORIGIN OF ADVANCED NETWORKS 
AND PERFORMANCE LEVELS 

Where did these performance levels and the advanced networks that 
utilize them come from, and where will they come from in the future? 
Research and education institutions and organizations have played the 
most important role to date in building and operating these networks. 
They have played that role by making significant technological 
innovations as well as by making significant financial investments. 
Nearly every higher education institution in the United States already 
has a campus network or a plan by which to obtain one; by 1995, this 
most certainly will also be true for the overwhelming majority of research 
and education institutions and organizations throughout the nation. 

The federal government, through the Advanced Research Projects 
Agency of the Department of the Army, the Department of Energy, the 
National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration, and quite a few other federal agencies, has played the 
second most important role to date in building and operating these 
networks. However, state and local governments and related regional 
undertakings have recently begun to look to advanced networks to 
improve the educational and economic opportunities available to their 
citizens and residents and to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency 
of their many civic administrative functions such as vehicle registration, 
property title documentation, and the like. 

Private and commercial enterprises like IBM and MCI have played 
the third most important role to date in building and operating these 
advanced networks. The role of such enterprises will become even more 
important during the 1990s as a result of their shift of emphasis from 
the analog world of switching telephone circuits to the digital world 
of routing datagram packets. It is very important for policy and 
technology planners at research and education institutions and 
organizations to recognize and plan the growing importance of the roles 
that are played by state and local governments and related regional 



48 PA U LEV AN PE TERS 



undertakings on the one hand, and private and commercial enterprises 
on the other. 

In this context, it is vital to recall that research and education 
networks have always been designed to address at least three requirements 
that are fundamental to research and education communities, 
requirements that have historically been much less important to private 
and commercial ones. 

Horizontal Integration, Technological Diversity, 
and Knowledge Creation/Use 

First of all, research and education networks strive for horizontal 
rather than vertical integration. This is to say that research and education 
networks are built and operated to accommodate the fact that humanists 
at two different institutions or organizations have more in common with 
each other than they do with, for example, scientists at their respective 
institutions or organizations. Private and commercial networks, on the 
other hand, are usually built to integrate the efforts of a variety of different 
actors in a common, vertical value or production chain. 

Second, research and education networks must also account for 
a wider degree of technological diversity than must private and 
commercial networks. This mostly reflects the wide range of institutions 
and organizations that research and education networks must 
encompass, but it also manifests the high degree of innovation that 
characterizes research and education communities. Finally, as a general 
rule, research and education networks are used in a greater variety of 
disciplinary and interdisciplinary settings and by a more highly skilled 
population than are private and commercial networks. Thus the users 
of research and education networks are generally engaged in knowledge 
creation and use to a much higher degree than are the users of typical 
private and commercial networks. 

All this will change in the 1990s as research and education networks 
begin to support the requirements of populations that have been typical 
of private and commercial networks and vice versa. This convergence 
is a widely predicted outcome of the conversion of industrial economies 
to information and services economies. As this conversion progresses, 
private and commercial enterprises will play an increasingly important 
role in building and operating advanced research and education 
networks. It is vital that research and education communities do not 
lose sight of their unique requirements during this necessary transition, 
and that they gauge the success of the transition by the genuine passing 
of the need for their vigilance in this regard. 

METAPHORS FOR NETWORKING TECHNOLOGY 

Before ending this discussion of advanced networks and turning 
attention to the information resources and services that have been and 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 49 



that are being enabled by these networks, the following list offers four 
metaphors for the future that is being created by the march of networking 
technology that has occupied our attention up to this point: 

1. building infrastructures, 

2. navigating virtual superhighways, 

3. drinking from fire hoses, and 

4. managing ecologies. 

We are clearly building and operating an electronic infrastructure 
that has the potential scope and scale of the many physical 
infrastructures, such as road, water, and sewage systems, for which we 
have already mobilized the expertise and found the resources. This new 
electronic infrastructure will both stimulate and constrain our activities 
and aspirations in the same ways that these other types of infrastructures 
have throughout modern history. 

We will conceptualize and experience this new infrastructure much 
as we conceptualize and experience the interstate highway system of 
today, the single most popular metaphor for what these advanced 
networks will represent to us some day. Only we will use maps, 
guidebooks, and other reference tools to navigate and travel in a new 
space that is a "virtual" rather than a "physical" presence in our lives. 

Until the reality of these advanced networks measures up to the 
full potential of this vision, though, the experience of using them will 
be rather like trying to drink from a fire hose. For some time, information 
will gush forth from such networks at much greater rates and in much 
greater volumes than we will be able to capture, manipulate, or 
assimilate. This means that, for the foreseeable future, there will continue 
to be a compelling need for informational intermediaries, such as 
librarians and other information specialists, who will acquire, organize, 
store, and add value to information even though it is being distributed 
and accessed by electronic rather than printed means. It is even arguable 
that advanced networks will increase the need for such intermediaries. 

It is very important for all of us, be we authors, intermediaries, 
or readers, to recognize that we cannot predict all, perhaps not even 
most, of the new things and behaviors that will emerge and occur in 
the new ecologies of thought and communication that these advanced 
networks represent. Accordingly, we need to think of ourselves as 
managing such ecologies as well as building and maintaining such 
infrastructures. 

One additional metaphor will, one hopes, help to illuminate the 
role of librarians in this new world of networked information resources 
and services. At the 1991 Mid- Winter Meeting of the American Library 
Association last January in Chicago, Senator Albert Gore, Jr., drew 
an interesting parallel between contemporary librarians and navigators 



50 PA ULEVAN PE TERS 



in the day of Christopher Columbus. Senator Gore expressed his belief 
that in times of revolutionary discovery, people tend to hug the shore 
until the knowledge of those who have made a science and an art of 
how to get from "here" to "there" becomes recognized and accepted. 
In the time of Columbus, for instance, the stature and rewards of 
navigators increased dramatically as a direct result of the success of 
the expeditions of Columbus and other explorers of the time. 
Analogously, the new world of research and education using advanced 
networks provides librarians with at least as many opportunities as 
it does threats. The librarians who will prosper in this new world will 
be those who take to heart the lesson of the navigators in the time 
of Columbus, a lesson that counsels that it is not the stars themselves 
that matter but what the stars can tell us about how we should plot 
our courses of action. 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES AND SERVICES 

Supercomputers 

Most research and education networks to date have been built and 
operated to provide access to computational resources and to other types 
of powerful and expensive scientific and technological instruments. 
Supercomputers represent the most important contemporary example 
of this type of resource. However, once the first research and education 
networks became operational and the uses to which they were actually 
being put became a subject of investigation, it was discovered that there 
was another resource that was at least equally, if not more, important 
to the users of such networks: people. 

Electronic Mail, Conferences, and Journals 

An analysis of the traffic being transported by the NSFNET makes 
the importance of people abundantly clear. As Figure 6 shows, at least 
20 percent of this traffic is accounted for by electronic mail, and some 
very large portion of the file exchange traffic percentage results from 
people sending files to each other rather than from computers sending 
the results of computations to their users. These figures compare to 
the almost 20 percent of the traffic that is accounted for by interactive 
computational processes. New applications and extensions of electronic 
mail are now occurring on a self-sustaining basis. In particular, the 
past year has witnessed the explosion of "special interest discussion 
groups" such as mail reflectors and listservers and the appearance of 
nearly twenty refereed journals. 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 51 



Major NSFNET Applications By Packets 

Networked mail ^.^j^^ File 

applications ^g| 1^, exchange 




6% 



Non-TCP/UDP 
services 

V%%*Sv%'S'c29 * OO / 

Interactive 

Other TCP/UDP ^Illi^PISf applications 
services _ 

Name 

Statistics from January 1 991 lookup 



NSFNET 



Figure 6 
Merit Network, Inc. 1991 



Databases and Digital Libraries 

Library catalogs and campus wide information systems represent 
a third category of networked information resources and services. It 
is this category that accounts for the lion's share of the growth and 
excitement in contemporary networking. Library catalogs are already 
far and away the most frequently found type of database on the Internet, 
and the databases of the Research Libraries Group and OCLC are the 
most frequently used "fee for service" databases on the Internet. These 
early efforts may not be self-sustaining there is certainly much more 
to come than has arrived to date but it is important to take note of 
just how quickly libraries have embraced the potential of advanced 
networks and how aggressively they are now seeking new ways to put 
these networks to work. Databases of primary research and education 
materials, known as "digital libraries," and of secondary materials, 
which provide reference information about the contents of print 
collections as well as the contents of digital libraries, are beginning 
to appear on research and education networks. The rate at which they 
will continue to appear promises to accelerate exponentially. 

High- Volume Print Facilities 

High-volume print facilities represent a relatively new fourth 
category of networked information resources and services. These 



52 PA U LEV AN PE TERS 



facilities are destined to replace the generation of high-volume 
photocopiers that is currently in use at so many research and education 
institutions and organizations. They will soon offer a cost-effective 
alternative to the laser printers that have become such a familiar feature 
of academic and corporate life. These facilities will be used to print 
information as soon as a person finds and requests it at the institution 
or organization at which he or she is located. For certain types of 
information and users, such "on demand/on site" printing will represent 
a vast improvement over the current approach of printing and storing 
all information for all users in anticipation of demand. Insofar as most 
studies estimate that one-third of the cost of conventional printed 
research and education materials can be attributed to the inventory 
activities and distribution channels for those materials, this new resource 
holds particular promise for reducing the expense and increasing the 
responsiveness of acquiring such materials. 

The likely impact of these high-volume printing facilities should 
not be discounted by the widely felt desire, at least in some quarters, 
for a completely electronic information distribution and access system. 
These facilities will allow us to experiment with a "just-in-time," in 
contrast to the long-established "just-in-case" information distribution 
and access system. They will also allow us to reconceptualize the role 
of paper. The role of paper in the emerging just-in-time system is as 
the most affordable and acceptable interface by which to access and 
use the information that is contained in an expanding number of 
electronic storehouses. This contrasts markedly to the role that paper 
plays in the existing just-in-case system as the exclusive means by which 
information is delivered, stored, and used. 

These high- volume print facilities located in copy center operations 
may also provide an effective way to address the lack of universal access 
to advanced networks. Dial-up connections to information resources 
and services on such networks are adequate and affordable ways to look 
for and to find relevant information in electronic formats, but they 
are too slow and unreliable to be used to access such information in 
any volume. The ability to route such information to a high-volume 
print facility that is on the network and that is located at a nearby 
copy center operation provides the answer to the question of how to 
benefit from the low cost of dial-up connections to advanced networks 
and from the relatively large information objects that are found on 
such networks. 



"Know hots" and Intelligent Databases 

Just over the horizon of contemporary networked information 
resources and services can be seen a new generation of such resources 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 53 



and services that apply artificial intelligence techniques in new and 
useful ways. Knowledge robots, or "knowbots," are algorithmic 
constructs engineered to wander advanced networks searching for 
information of interest to the human being whose interests and 
requirements they represent. The term cybernautics has recently come 
into use to refer to the science and practice of creating and using these 
network travel agents and navigational advisors. Intelligent databases 
are collections of information that are capable of knowing when and 
how they grow or are changed and what the significance of their growth 
and modification is to a variety of interested parties with whom they 
are in regular or even continuous communication. 



LIBRARIES AND NETWORKS: PROBLEMS, PROMISES 

These networked information resources and services are interesting 
in their own rights, but what can they do to ameliorate some of the 
pressing problems that face libraries and their constituencies in 
contemporary research and education communities? For instance, the 
skyrocketing costs of library materials illustrated in Figure 7 shows 
that serials expenditures in the 119 members of the Association of 
Research Libraries (ARL) increased 53 percent in the past three years 
while monographic expenditures increased 19 percent. The number of 
serials titles purchased dropped 1 percent in the same period, and the 
number of monographic volumes purchased dropped 16 percent. All 
these facts add up to the same thing: Much less information is being 
obtained for much more money. The larger, darker bar at the top of 
Figure 8 shows that nearly 40 percent of ARL members reduced their 
rate of acquiring new monographs by 21 percent or more in the past 
three years. Clearly, the attention that has been paid to what is known 
as the "serials pricing crisis" needs to be complemented by a heightened 
level of concern about what this crisis has done to the pattern of 
monographic acquisitions in academic and research libraries. 

The size of library collections and, therefore, the amount of space 
that is needed to house library collections continues to expand at an 
exponential rate as well. One effect of the extraordinary increases in 
the costs of library materials has been to reduce the rate of acquisition 
of new materials and, therefore, to reduce the rate of growth of space 
requirements. But this can hardly be put forward as an acceptable way 
to manage a library and to address its space needs. 

Another pressing concern of libraries in research and education 
communities is the underutilization of materials once they have been 
acquired. A familiar pattern emerges: Less than 60 percent of the 
materials in academic and research libraries ever circulate, and 80 percent 



54 



PAUL EVAN PETERS 



c 

h 
a 
n 

9 
e 

S 
i 

n 
c 
e 

1 

9 
8 
6 



60% i 



40% - 



20% - 



Serial Expenditures (-52%) 
Serial Unit Price (51%) 

Monograph Unit Price (41% 



Mono. Expenditures (19%) 



-40% 



Monograph Volumes 
Purchased (-16%) 




-20% 



1986 



1988 



1990 
Fiscal Year 



1992 



Figure 7. Monograph and serial costs in ARL Libraries, 1985-86 to 1989- 
90 (Stubbs, K. [1991]. Introduction. In S. M. Pritchard & E. Finer [Comps.], 
ARL Statistics 1989-90 [p. 6]. Washington, DC: Association of Research 
Libraries) 



of the materials that do circulate do so relatively soon after they have 
been acquired. Too many analysts have been all too quick to explain 
this phenomenon by decrying the declining quality of the literature 
record. But information cannot be used if it cannot be found, and better 
access mechanisms increase levels of use. This has been repeatedly 
affirmed by collection use studies performed both before and after the 
advent of online library information systems. 

Thus the use of networked information resources and services 
promises to reduce the costs of acquiring library materials, to stabilize 
the rate of growth of the space required to house library materials, 
and to increase the rate of use of library materials. It is not yet clear 
that these specific promises will in fact be realized, but a great deal 
of contemporary effort is motivated by the hope that they will. 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESOURCES 



55 



-21% or More 



-20% to -11% 



-10% to 0% 



0% to +10% 



+11% to +20% 



+ 21% or More 




10% 



20% 30% 
% of Libraries 



40% 



50% 



Monographs 



Serials 



Figure 8. Percent change in monographs and serials purchased, 1986- 
90 (Stubbs, K. [1991]. Introduction. In S. M. Pritchard & E. Finer [Comps.], 
ARL Statistics 1989-90 [p. 8]. Washington, DC: Association of Research 
Libraries) 



Cost/Benefit of Networked versus Print Resources and Services 

Two things are very clear in the extremely complicated and 
somewhat theoretical area of the "cost/benefit" performance of 
networked information resources and services as compared with their 
print equivalents. First, the transition from card (paper) form catalogs 
to online ones may have something to tell us about the transition that 
we may or may not now be making from paper-form publications to 
electronic ones. In the author's experience, card catalogs collapsed and 
became unworkable under the pressure of the information explosion. 
Something quite similar is happening now with printed primary 
research and education materials: the existing system is collapsing and 
becoming unworkable. No matter how difficult it is to imagine, the 
transition from an exclusively print to a progressively more electronic 



56 PAUL EVAN PETERS 



information distribution and access system may well be something about 
which we have very little choice, and it is certainly something about 
which our constituencies may have no choice at all. 

Second, research and education communities, and particularly their 
libraries, are beginning to shift toward a "make" posture and away 
from a "buy" one as the business strategy by which they gain access 
to the information resources and services that they need. In addition 
to the cry to "take back the rights" that is heard in contemporary forums 
devoted to the serials pricing crisis, a new call is voiced to "take back 
the means of production." This new interest in self-publishing, both 
personal and institutional and in partnership undertakings that build 
new networked information resources and services in not-for-profit and 
barter settings, is well worth watching and experimenting with. 

Networked information resources and services also promise to 
improve access to brittle books that have been preserved on microfilm 
and then digitally scanned, and to enable library services to be available 
around the clock and from any point on the campus network. These 
resources and services allow faculty, students, information technologists, 
and librarians to work together to effectively manage the information 
and knowledge that is essential to the integrity and success of all research 
and education communities. 

Networked Resources and Information Systems Design 

Networked information resources and services also force us to 
rethink the design assumptions of most of the current generation of 
local library information systems. Most such systems assume that they 
are providing service to a smart user using a dumb terminal right around 
the corner from a large computer that contains descriptions of 
information owned by the library. The problem is that in today's world, 
we are all dealing with "dumb" (i.e., inexperienced) users who are using 
personal computers and workstations located almost anywhere to access 
computers of all sizes to obtain information that is sometimes neither 
owned nor licensed by the same institution or organization that owns 
or licenses the computer. Designers and vendors of such systems are 
well aware of how completely their systems need to be rethought in 
terms of a "networked information" rather than a "housed information" 
architecture. The buyers and funders of such systems now need to 
recognize this fact and to account for it in their strategic plans and, 
even more important, in their depreciation schedules. 

Redesigning local library information systems is only one of the 
things that we need to do to get ready to benefit from networked 
information resources and services. In general, research and education 
institutions and organizations must focus on improving their readiness 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESO URGES 57 



in four key areas: campus networks, the automated library, skilled and 
equipped end-users, and hospitable culture. It is tautological to say 
that campus networks have to become ubiquitous, affordable, and 
responsive for the promise of networked information resources and 
services to be realized. It is equally important to have a vital, evolving 
library technology program and a skilled and equipped group of end- 
users. But these three readiness factors, no matter how necessary, are 
not sufficient. Efforts directed at these factors need to be planned and 
executed in a cultural setting that is hospitable to their purposes and 
problems. Promotion and tenure practices, for instance, need to recognize 
and reward excellence in authoring networked information as well as 
recognizing and rewarding excellence in authoring printed information. 
Accreditation and statistical practices and criteria need to rate libraries 
on how well they deliver information as well as on how well they buy 
and maintain information. And information technologists and 
librarians need to work together to construct a "single information 
system image" for the faculty, students, administrators, and other 
stakeholders who depend so much on their vision, talent, and energy. 

It is also extremely important to recognize that contemporary efforts 
devoted to advanced networks provide the opportunity to merge two 
quite different and equally powerful research and education networking 
traditions. During the 1970s and 1980s, librarians were funding and 
building the Research Libraries Group and OCLC, arguably the only 
integrated, nationwide applications of networking that the research and 
education community have ever successfully made. During the same 
period, information technologists were funding and building the 
ARPANET, BITNET, the NSFNET, and the global Internet, among 
other advanced networks. What we are about right now is the leveraging 
of each tradition to the benefit of the other and to the benefit of the 
constituencies that are shared by librarians and information 
technologists. 



THE INFORMATION MARKETPLACE 

The readiness of the information marketplace must also be improved 
in at least five key areas pricing, payment, protection, regulation, and 
experimentation. The marketplace does not currently know how to price 
networked information, and even if it did, we would not know how 
to pay for that information in all the ways and by all the schemes 
we need. The marketplace has not come to agreement on ways and 
means for protecting networked information from unauthorized 
modification as well as from misuse and misappropriation. The 
regulatory framework by which "conduit" is differentiated from 



58 PA U LEV AN PE TERS 



"content" is extremely fragile, having resulted from a series of ad hoc 
rather than deliberate decisions. The result is that some lines of business 
are not allowed for some enterprises, and some activities are judged 
to produce "unrelated business income" for some research and education 
institutions and organizations. Finally, experimentation with new 
networked information resources and services is too costly and risky 
and the results are too anecdotal for all parties involved. We simply 
must devise a much more satisfactory system of research, development, 
and dissemination than the one we have at present. 

Coalition for Networked Information 

The Coalition for Networked Information is particularly devoted 
to identifying and addressing such institutional and marketplace 
readiness factors. Its mission is to promote the creation of and access 
to information resources in networked environments in order to enrich 
scholarship and to enhance intellectual productivity. Founded in March 
1990 as a joint activity of ARL, CAUSE, and EDUCOM, it has grown 
like wildfire to a membership of just over 135 separate institutions and 
organizations. The real story of the Coalition's membership, though, 
is told by the variety of information, service, and technology providers 
that have joined numerous research and educational institutions and 
quite a few collaborating professional and scholarly societies in a 
common program of work devoted to a shared vision of how the nature 
of information management must change through the end of the 
twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first. 



SOME FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS 

Four questions are fundamental to realizing the full promise of 
networked information resources and services, questions that all 
concerned parties, not just information technologists and librarians, 
can relate to and help to answer. 

First, the technical question: What benefits can be realistically 
achieved? We have to find a way to spend less time on wishful thinking 
and more time on improving the performance of the systems and 
technologies that we already have. We must figure out ways to get new 
value out of these existing assets. We must also be ready, willing, and 
able to change the way we have been doing things to leverage these 
existing assets to get more things done faster and without a loss of 
quality. But the major thrust of the technical question is the pressing 
need to improve our ability to hold technology accountable to providing 
real benefits to real people. 



NETWORKED INFORMATION RESO URGES 59 

Second, the political question: Who will experience these benefits 
when using what resources? This question has an economic as well 
as a political component but, especially in the United States, the political 
component is much more important. We must figure out ways to become 
more concerned than we have been to date about how access to the 
benefits of networked information resources and services is obtained. 
We also must become better at remembering that diverse user populations 
enrich and strengthen the design and performance of technological 
systems. 

A third question calls attention to the role of institutions like 
libraries in consolidating the gains of technological advance. It is the 
institutional question: How will these benefits be secured and routinized 
as soon as possible? We must figure out ways to refit institutional and 
organizational facilities, to reallocate institutional and organizational 
budgets, and to re-skill relevant institutional and organizational 
professionals if we are to succeed at embedding networked information 
resources and services into the milieu of research and education 
communities. 

Finally, we must assure ourselves that what we do contributes to 
improving the basic conditions of human existence and that we can 
explore that concern by asking the human question: Why will these 
benefits contribute to the quality of life and the inspiration of intellect? 
Without applying this test to our activities and aspirations, we can 
never know whether we are working on the things that can make the 
greatest difference in the course of human affairs. 



CONCLUSION 

Our facility with the technical question will determine whether 
networked information resources and services will become as useful 
as we hope or will, instead, become sandboxes in which technophiliacs 
play with their new and quite expensive toys. Our facility with the 
political question will determine whether these resources and services 
will become opportunities available to all who seek to learn and think 
or will, instead, become battlefields on which conflicts about ends and 
means reflect differences in opportunities. Our facility with the 
institutional question will determine whether networked information 
resources and services will become familiar and trusted features of the 
libraries of research and education communities or will, instead, become 
the products of new marketplaces in which financial means play a 
disproportionately influential role. Finally, our facility with the human 



60 PA U LEV AN PE TERS 



question will determine whether networked information resources and 
services will become esoteric tools used by limited populations for 
narrow purposes or will, instead, become "fields of dreams" for which 
the guiding principle is, "If we build them, the users will come." 



SUSAN K. MARTIN 

University Librarian 

Georgetown University 

Washington, DC 



Defining "It": 
NREN's Opportunities for Librarians 



ABSTRACT 

Various aspects of the National Research and Education Network 
(NREN) are discussed. Legislation currently under consideration is 
characterized by a focus on the research community to the exclusion 
of other potential user communities and is also characterized by a low 
level of federal funding. Librarians have already played a role in 
changing the focus of the proposed network and need to continue this 
effort. Other issues discussed include defining when the Internet evolves 
into the NREN, who will have access to the network, what will be 
accessible on the network, and who will pay for access to the network. 
Finally, the role of the librarian in a leadership capacity in the 
implementation of the network is discussed. 



INTRODUCTION 

In recent months, the opportunities stimulated by Senator Albert 
Gore's (D.-Tenn.) vision of an information highway for the nation have 
caused many people to have visions of free access to all information 
for all people, in this country and in others. In March 1991, the Coalition 
for Networked Information met, followed immediately by the EDUCOM 
National NET'91. Coming from those two meetings was a clear sense 
that although progress is being made, no one really knows what "it" 
is; that is, what the National Research and Education Network (NREN) 



61 



62 SUSAN K. MARTIN 



really is or will be. Given this situation, we may not even know when 
it comes into existence. We think we know the general direction that 
the information society is going, and because we are a profession 
concerned with the access to and management of information, this 
phenomenon is going to be critically important to us. But we can only 
begin to guess what the landscape will be like, who the stakeholders 
will be, and suggest in what ways we might contribute to and participate 
in the national network. 

What are some of the issues at hand that we need to recognize? 
There are a host of rather difficult questions to address; some will have 
to be addressed by the library community alone, whereas others should 
be addressed in concert with those communities (academic, adminis- 
trative, computing) that have already chosen to ally themselves with 
us in the pursuit of this vision. 



LEGISLATION 

Legislation, which librarians thought well in hand, continues to 
be a problem. At this writing, Senator Gore's bill, apparently 
noncontroversial and ready to go last year, is not safely tucked away 
with the sufficient number of votes. He has reintroduced his bill, and 
there is a companion House bill, but there is also a bill being put 
forward by the Senate Energy Committee because of its lack of 
satisfaction with the Gore bill. In addition, the whole education 
community is working with the Senate Labor and Education Committee 
to attempt to bring to the fore some information policy issues that 
remain unaddressed by the Gore bill. 

When Gore's bill was reintroduced in February 1991, the Congress 
was challenged by the administration to pass it within one hundred 
days, which would have been some time in May 1991. The good news 
is that there is bipartisan support for the bill and no serious disagreement 
between the White House and Congress, although White House Science 
Advisor Bromley apparently believes that this can be an administration 
effort alone with no assistance required from Congress. This relatively 
minor point alone seems insufficient reason to derail the legislation. 

The bad news is that some, including voices from the library world, 
are questioning the advisability of a piece of legislation that envisions 
a network focused primarily on the research community. The Senate 
Energy Committee has its own agenda. It is unhappy with the 
governance structure suggested by the bill and believes that the provisions 
of the bill will not adequately support the national security, access, 
and governance concerns of the Department of Energy. Governance is 
only loosely addressed in the Gore legislation. As it turns out, the library 



DEFINING "IT" 63 



community shares the concerns of the Senate Energy Committee and 
for a very understandable reason: each group believes that as the statute 
is currently designed, its own vested interests will not be seen as critical 
in the administration and operation of the network. 

For example, the management structure as envisioned by the 
administration is a Federal Networking Council composed of the 
National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, 
the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Management and 
Budget, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and a few other 
federal agencies perceived by the Senate Science and Technology 
Committee as operating programs requiring network support. This 
council is to be subdivided into working groups and supplemented 
by an advisory body that has on it representatives from the Library 
of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National 
Agricultural Library, among other federal agencies. However, this 
council, with its policy-making power and its advisory council, is not 
included in any legislation. Which governance structure will prevail? 
And how will the nonfederal sector participate? 

The Senate Energy Committee may suggest various options for 
governance, among them a national networking council, a nonprofit 
corporation analogous to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the 
Federal Networking Council, or the FCCSET (the Federal Computer 
Council for Science, Energy, and Technology). Any one of these, they 
posit, could oversee "it" and let me remind you here that it is still 
unclear what "it" is. Is the network something that stands alone, is 
clearly identifiable, and can be governed by a single body? Only a few 
months ago, IBM, MCI, and Merit joined together to form a not-for- 
profit organization, ANS, that would implement and operate the NREN. 
They are not alone in looking toward the increasing desire to network 
as a source of profit. 

The network exists already, is in use, and there is a large and growing 
customer base already accustomed to having access to certain facilities 
through the network at a cost that is generally absorbed by institutional 
budgets. With the NREN governance structure as proposed, there is 
the advantage of presumed continuing federal support and the promise 
of wider access to a publicly held program, but these are assumptions 
and presumptions. The legislation still leaves too many important 
decisions up to a small group with relatively narrow interests, and it 
also represents a low level of federal dollar investment. 

The dominance of federal agencies in the legislation, and therefore 
in the way we tend to perceive the structure today, is not comfortable 
to many. Remember that the name of the legislation is the High- 
Performance Computing Act of 1991; it is not the National Research 



64 SUSAN K. MARTIN 



and Education Network Act. The NREN is only one part of the 
legislation, which is based on a long-standing relationship between 
government agencies and university science and technology research. 
From the perspective of the federal government and its agencies, the 
purpose of the network is to better enable communication between 
federal employees and federal government contractor scientists. The fact 
that the rest of the university community has acquired access to this 
network is not recognized by either the administration or Congress, 
and this will remain the case until librarians begin to demand 
characteristics, performance, and costs that are unforeseen by the science- 
oriented agencies and the drafters of the various pieces of legislation. 
The existing network structure is governed in large part by the NSF 
and includes regional networks, which are important to the current 
operations but which are totally ignored in the legislation. These 
regional networks are closer to the users of the network, are more diverse, 
and are not totally federally funded, but they represent the investment 
of state funds and institutional dollars. The proposed governance places 
all the voice in Washington, which is not necessarily where it should be. 
As the American public learns of the network, there will be a 
sufficient outcry that the governance structure and concomitant issues 
will have to change to meet the outstanding needs. With libraries' 
legislative support and contacts, librarians are in an eminently suitable 
position to talk to their representatives in Congress about the desirability 
of creating a network that can serve more than just the scientists of 
this nation. 



THE E IN NREN 

The E in NREN stands for Education. It was not always there; 
in fact, librarians played a prominent role in causing the E to appear 
in NREN. Before early 1989, it was just the National Research Network 
designed to support scientists in their contractual work with federal 
agencies. 

The E was put into NREN, but is it more than just a sop? We 
need to better determine our role in the development and implementation 
of this network. We have to tell Congress and the public why the E 
is in NREN, and what it means for the network and for the population 
of this country. We have not done that very well yet but seem to have 
sat back on our laurels, having done the alphabetically difficult task 
of inserting the E. We have to follow up by convincing Congress, federal 
agencies, and our colleagues that this is an essential capability for schools 
and libraries in enhancing the productivity and education level of the 



DEFINING "IT" 65 



nation. It is almost as though the creators of the concept allowed us 
to have our way by inserting the E, but nothing else has really changed. 
And that is unacceptable to me; it should also be unacceptable to you. 

What is the library community's role, then? One obvious one is 
to continue to lobby Congress, directly and through our professional 
associations, to urge them to accept this conceptual change and to regard 
the network as the beginning of a nationwide communication system 
that will have as much impact as the telephone system, if not more. 
The benefits of the system need to be described more precisely and 
should balance public good and private gain. I once talked with a senator 
who was totally enraptured by the concept of a ten-year-old boy in 
a rural area of his state being able to communicate with and learn 
French from someone elsewhere in the country or even in France; we 
need to develop realistic visions of how the network will be used by 
the public, and why it will be good for the country. 

Also concerned are the publishers and other for-profit organizations, 
with copyright, intellectual property, and the profit-making issues as 
motivating factors. This is particularly important because Congress and 
the White House have made the assumption that NREN will ultimately 
move to the private sector. If this network is going to be a vitally 
important tool for the nation, who will pay for it? Just as some are 
making an analogy with a supposedly free highway system, there is 
an analogy with the telephone system that we have constructed in this 
country. Assume that the Gore bill passes and that funds are 
appropriated. The funds will be used for research, for the overhead 
needed to coordinate the network, for a "directory" of resources on 
the network, and for special grant-assisted projects. Government funding 
will not support the routine operation of the network. 

What can the average person, or the average library, assume that 
he (or it) will gain from the passage of the bill and the appropriation 
of funds? Equipment? No that is a local cost, unless someone 
successfully writes a grant proposal for a project that addresses some 
activity described by the bill. Communications costs or cabling? 
Unlikely. First of all, most of the country is already networked; the 
funding in the bill will go toward the research necessary to develop 
higher speed networks and not toward the implementation and 
operation of these networks. 

Most important for librarians will be the cost of accessing 
information on the network. Later in this paper, I will address in more 
detail what resources are likely to be on the network. For now, let me 
suggest that the appropriate model for libraries is a mixed economic 
model. With the exception of "free" information such as library catalogs, 
conferences, and electronic mail, much of the benefit of the network 
will result from accessing databases held by the private sector. Right 



66 SUSAN K. MARTIN 



now, libraries pay differently for online databases, generally linked to 
the nature of the original publisher of the database. In turn, libraries 
make a determination about how the costs will be passed on: in some 
institutions, full cost recovery, both direct and indirect, is implemented; 
in others, the library subsidizes all online searching; most of us are 
somewhere in between. With the NREN, I suggest that database 
publishers will not make their information available through the 
network until they can be assured of compensation for access to those 
data. As opposed to being a "free good," NREN access may merely 
facilitate access to increasingly higher cost information. 



WHAT IS "IT?" 

The Internet exists. It is a network of networks and institutions 
evolved from the NSFNET and governed by a group of peers. Most 
of us in academic environments have access to BITNET, a network 
of academic computing facilities; this has evolved in many instances 
into access to the Internet as well. It seems quite clear that NREN 
represents the next stage of evolution of this nationwide and worldwide 
network. There are, however, some amazing ambiguities and a very 
fuzzy border between today's Internet and tomorrow's NREN. It may 
not matter very much what the distinction is between the two, but 
the fact is that people perceive a difference, and, as they say, perception 
is all-important. 

When does NREN become NREN? Some of the possibilities include 
the following: 

1. when the Gore bill passes; 

2. when legislation is not only passed, but funds are appropriated; 

3. when a gigabit network exists; 

4. when NSF or OSTP (or some other federal agency) says so; 

5. when a governance structure is in place. 

Even the experts admit to being confused about this question. Some 
are beginning to say that it does not matter because the NREN will 
be just a small portion of an evolving national network that will come 
into existence over the next few years. Peter Likins (1991), president 
of Lehigh, said at National NET'91 that he sees NREN as an academic 
precursor for a broader private telecommunications infrastructure for 
this country. 

Let us frame the question differently: when the Gore bill passes 
and is funded, will it make any perceptible difference for libraries? I 
suggest that it will make a difference, but that we will not notice it 
because the bill, and NREN, are part of the evolving network scene 



DEFINING "IT" 67 



that we are already engaged in. Instead of focusing on NREN, we need 
to decide what we, as a community, want to provide our users from 
the nationwide network that may or may not be NREN. 



ACCESS 

Instead of trying to decide, then, when Internet will become NREN, 
let us look at the kinds of capabilities we, as research and academic 
librarians, want for ourselves and our users. In a word, we want access. 
In the best of all possible worlds, for librarians, we would have free, 
unregulated, and unlimited access to as much information as is 
reasonably possible. And we want equitable and relatively low-cost 
access. Equitable means that whoever seeks information should be able 
to get whatever information is available on the same terms as any other 
person seeking that information. This is putting into practice Jefferson's 
ideal of a democratic society. There should be no distinction between 
information seekers on the basis of income, education, or other place 
in society. That is a very general statement and is subject to all kinds 
of protest and caveats, but as a whole, this is the ideal world. Given 
that, librarians should start out with that operating assumption and 
only give up the ideal when forced to by necessity or by compromise. 
Clearly this means expanding our interests beyond the academic 
community. Low cost is an ambiguous term, but again it attempts to 
convey a principle and a reality: the principle is that if people do not 
need to pay, they should not have to, and the reality is that information, 
like everything else, costs money. 

Librarians want access to the network by the entire education 
community, from kindergarten to the postgraduate and research 
community. This vision evokes the national network concept. Some 
would say "Kindergarten? Are you serious?" But there is a community 
of interest lobbying for access to the network on behalf of all schools 
and teachers in the United States. After all, if we are to have a productive 
citizenry, should not children have access to a national network at the 
earliest possible age? A major question is the matter of cost of access 
for thousands of teachers and millions of schoolchildren. Is it possible 
that our society will gradually be willing to use tax dollars to pay for 
access to the network in the public schools or tuition dollars in the 
private schools? Institutions of higher education, and their libraries, 
need to perceive that access to the NREN by the K-12 population will 
have a distinct impact on the resources required for higher education 
in the future, and librarians should be taking an active interest in the 
broadened reach of the network. 

Librarians want availability of the system for independent, 
unaf filiated users, whether for research, education, or business purposes. 



68 SUSAN K. MARTIN 



Right now, if you are not associated with an institution of higher 
education that is an Internet node, it is complicated and sometimes 
expensive to get an account on the network. This question resembles 
that of providing academic library access to unaffiliated scholars; our 
society is not set up well to deal with people as individuals rather than 
people as members of institutions. It is certainly easier to deal with 
institutions, but we must ultimately come around to coping with the 
question of how to give that community access to the electronic 
information resources at our disposal, just as we have already determined 
that public libraries are the way to give them access to print information. 
Public libraries may continue to be the appropriate mechanism in a 
networked world as well. 

We want to seriously explore the possibility of linking to the NREN 
governance structure the existing nationwide networks that support the 
exchange and delivery of information. That means the current regional 
networks for NSFNET and Internet, but it also means OCLC, RLG, 
and some of the other information and library-oriented services that 
have been in place for one or two decades, have established user bases, 
and provide significant information services to the country. 

Turning now to specifics, what will NREN give access to? 
Considering that the NREN is an evolution of the Internet, we can 
hazard some reasonable guesses. Electronic mail and computer 
conferencing are two obvious and early suggestions. These have already 
changed our lives; the Faxon Institute conference held in April was 
preceded and followed by a two-month-long computer conference, made 
available to the speakers and attendees at the conference to share ideas 
before and after the meeting. The electronic mail capacity of the system 
is saving time that used to be spent trying to reach people who were 
never available. Now one just leaves a message in a mailbox, and the 
addressees respond whenever they can perhaps at midnight or on 
weekends but they do respond. We have not worked out all the bugs; 
there is no central directory in which one can look up user ID's; it 
is still difficult to send messages to Europe; and I continue to have 
trouble with CompuServe but all in all, electronic mail is a useful 
facility that changes the very nature of our communication processes. 

Another resource already on the Internet is library online catalogs. 
Librarians rapidly embraced the Internet's capabilities. This seemed 
like a good idea at the time. It is unclear at this point whether it really 
is sensible to make individual library catalogs universally available. 
Let us look at some conditions under which access to online catalogs 
is useful, and others under which it may be at best misleading. For 
the faculty member at an institution that has a catalog accessible through 



DEFINING "IT" 69 



Internet but not in any other dial-up mode, the availability of the catalog 
online is clearly useful. These catalogs may also be useful if you know 
what you are looking for or if you know the strengths of the libraries 
represented in the Internet. On the other hand, if a researcher is 
attempting to find a specific item and does not care where it is held, 
having two hundred individual library catalogs online through one 
Internet will be only frustrating. In one of the recent online conferences, 
there was a discussion of the use of online catalogs on the Internet. 
I could characterize these communications as inconclusive; some are 
delighted at the availability of all this bibliographic information and 
are busy teaching students and faculty how to use it, whereas others 
are certain that a hundred catalogs blooming on the Internet will not 
be helpful to the researcher. 

The availability of researchers' files on the network is of considerable 
interest. In reality, though, many research-oriented files are, if not 
copyrighted, at least considered proprietary by their creators. We still 
do not know very much about the way in which scholars exchange 
information and under what conditions they are willing to do so. More 
and more, the products of research efforts are closely held and, less 
frequently than in the past, shared with the community of scholars 
especially if that community's size cannot be predicted because anyone 
can have access to the network. It will be necessary for some research 
to be done to identify conditions under which information can be shared 
versus those conditions under which files are to be held privately. It 
is clearly within the scope of the library profession's research interest 
to address this topic in a manner that will have an impact on the world 
of scholarly communication. Who else can better examine and describe 
the ways in which people access and use information? 

Among the easier conditions to examine, ironically, are the 
published databases; that is, the databases produced by the private sector 
that have royalties associated with their use and that we are already 
using through brokers such as DIALOG and BRS. As the information 
publishers and brokers become comfortable with the concept of a 
nationwide network, and as they are able to confirm that they can charge 
per access, print, or download, they will make their databases available 
throughout the NREN. All the appropriate business structures are in 
place; licensing fees have been developed, site licenses exist, and the 
private sector has begun to recognize that access to its information online 
could be a better deal than they had originally anticipated. Libraries 
will have to cope with the question of how to charge. Will they subsidize 
access to these databases? Or when someone wants to access a commercial 
database, will they have to use special passwords or account numbers 
so that they can be billed, either at cost or at a subsidized rate? 



70 SUSAN K. MARTIN 



Noncommercial databases will also be relatively easy to handle. 
Here, one presumes that data are being made available to the world 
at large; the database creator neither worries that his ideas will be stolen 
nor that he will not receive recompense for the use of the data. The 
issues here are ones of ease of access, including standardization of 
searching, location of the database in a directory, and related issues 
that, considering the alternatives, will not be serious impediments. 



NETWORK ACCESS COSTS 

Some librarians are adamant that if they cannot offer a service 
without charge, they should not offer it at all. I disagree with this 
approach for two reasons: (a) it is unrealistic given the way our society 
interprets the interaction between the public and private sectors, and 
(b) there is plenty of leeway to allow libraries or their parent institutions 
to make distinct decisions about subsidizing access to information. 

The costs of accessing the network are not at all clear, but my 
suspicion is that access will not be cheap. We have a wonderful tendency 
to ignore discussion of costs when we talk about the future network. 
The Coalition for Networked Information has seven working groups; 
none of them is treating cost as an issue, at least at this point, although 
most of the topics addressed by the working groups have direct cost 
implications. 

Thus far, we know that public funds will not pay for the support 
of the network and that the intention is to move the operation of the 
network into the private sector. We also know that the NREN will require 
wiring, equipment, software, and training, among other things, all of 
which cost money. Where do librarians think the funds will come from 
to support this? The direct answer to this question is, I believe, that 
we are not thinking about this issue at all yet, but we should be. 

Libraries, when confronted with whatever set of costs will be 
associated with NREN, will have to make decisions. Should the library 
continue to be on the network? If so, who is going to pay for access? 
Will the costs be passed along to the end-user, or will the library subsidize 
access? What about access by the user directly from his or her personal 
computer at home? Will the cost structure be different for home access, 
causing people to turn more toward the library for access? I cannot 
answer these questions, and I think librarians as a community can only 
speculate about them at this time. But we should be lining up our 
arguments, just as I said earlier that we should assume the most ideal 
situation and fight for compromises from that extreme rather than 
beginning with an already negotiated stance. 



DEFINING "IT" 71 



Let me qualify what I have just said because this position, taken 
to extremes, can be counterproductive. We need, as a profession, to 
stand up for the best interest of our users. However, if we are perceived 
as being unrealistic and unwilling to deal and negotiate, we will be 
ignored. That happened to a part of the library community last year 
during the discussion of the Paperwork Reduction Act; I strongly suggest 
that we do not want to have a similar occurrence in the future. 



WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE 

We, as librarians, need to raise our voices. We are being heard, 
and our representatives in Congress are doing an excellent job; however, 
I do not think that most of the Senate or the House realize that librarians 
may have an interest in the NREN. They need to get letters. One very 
important thing that can be done, both before and after the bill is 
passed, is for librarians to write their Congressmen, urging passage 
of the bill, indicating the intense depth of interest in it by the library 
and education communities, and urging appropriation of funds. 

Librarians also need to educate the research community. These are 
the people who invented BITNET, who have been using networks for 
file transfers and electronic mail for years. They need to become aware 
that their communication and computing tool is about to be used by 
a very different community within the academic setting and by a 
population outside academia. We need to tell them what is happening 
and why we are urging wide access to the system, and we need to gain 
their support. 

We have created our own opportunity to raise the awareness of 
the wider library community, elected officials, and library users. The 
White House Conference on Library and Information Services will be 
held July 9-13, 1991. Many state conferences have sent forward 
recommendations that the government support the NREN and 
particularly the educational role of NREN. The delegates to the White 
House Conference have the opportunity of ensuring that NREN emerges 
as one of the major recommendations for support and as a target of 
opportunity for our society in the coming decade. 



LEADERSHIP 

Can librarians be leaders in the implementation of the NREN? 
It is not farfetched to assume that librarians, and particularly academic 
librarians, can and should push themselves forward to participate as 
equals with researchers and computer scientists. First, we already have 



72 SUSAN K. MARTIN 



the Coalition for Networked Information. Librarians are nominally an 
equal partner within the three participating groups, two of which are 
computer professionals. In fact the majority of the attendance at 
meetings, and the active participation, comes from the library sector. 
This must continue. Second, we must remember that it is all well and 
good to link computers by laying fiber and using communications 
technologies, but people must perceive a need to send information back 
and forth, and it must be more than electronic mail to justify the great 
expense that is foreseen by the NREN. What happens on university 
campuses? The engineers and scientists implement a campus wide 
network without a good idea of what will flow over the lines. One 
of the first resources widely used is the library catalog and other library- 
related information databases. 

So librarians are already among the leaders, and we can lead in 
some very specific areas. In part, this issue is a problem of the public 
stereotype of librarians. Nonlibrarians are surprised to find that the 
library community not only knows about computers and information 
technology but has also been on the cutting edge of the development 
of these technological applications. This is a wonderful opportunity 
to address the stereotype and to show others that librarians do more 
than check out books. 

Most important, however, are the issues of service and information 
delivery. Librarians understand how to organize information and how 
people use, seek, and acquire information. They also understand the 
kinds of problems and issues they run into in the process. If the library 
had invented BITNET, do you suppose that there would be no directory 
of user names or of available resources? The documentation for use 
of the system would be far more adequate for the purpose. (I say this 
with apologies because BITNET is a wonderful tool, but it does have 
its drawbacks.) Librarians must step forward to assume the role of service 
provider and information disseminator for networked information, just 
as we have been able to do for information in print. In individual cases, 
on individual campuses, this may well represent a strong partnership 
between the library and the computer center. In a public environment, 
it is likely to be the library alone. Nonetheless, people will need help 
in order to find what they need, and the library profession is the 
appropriate group to help. 

Librarians will be leaders, and we will be able to play a significant 
role in the way that information is brought to all levels of education 
and need throughout this country. Self-confidence, and assuredness that 
we are capable of having this kind of impact, is the foundation of all 
that is needed. 



DEFINING "IT" 73 



REFERENCE 

Likins, P. (1991, March). Information highways: Who pays? Paper presented at the 
EDUCOM National NET'91 Conference. Washington, DC. 



JAMES E. RUSH 

Executive Director 

PALINET 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 



Keeping the Window of Opportunity 
Open for the Private Sector 



ABSTRACT 

If libraries are to grow in the coming years, they must redefine the 
services offered, the clientele served, and the mechanisms for financing 
operations. Through existing regional telecommunication networks and 
the proposed National Research and Education Network (NREN), 
libraries can de-emphasize physical collections and become virtual 
libraries, providing global access to information not only to their 
traditional clientele but to business and industry as well. By serving 
the private sector, libraries can contribute to the economic growth of 
society; however, by charging for these information services, they may 
do so on a profitable basis. PALINET is developing a program that 
will enable its members to deliver fee-based services to business and 
industry; this program could serve as a model for services that would 
be available on a national network. 



INTRODUCTION 

Much has been said and written about the advantages that will 
accrue to libraries as telecommunication networks become ever more 
pervasive and as access to these communication facilities becomes easier. 
However, the assumption that underlies such talk and writing seems 
to be that the clientele of individual libraries will remain largely 



74 



PRIVATE SECTOR 75 



unchanged. This assumption has been invalid for a long time and cannot 
be allowed to remain unchallenged in the networking environment 
of today and tomorrow. 

The importance of timely and accurate information to economic 
development and growth cannot be overstated (Koenig, 1990; McAdams, 
Vietorisz, Dougan, & Lombardi, 1988). Access to information cannot, 
therefore, be restricted to our traditional clientele. Nor can we simply 
continue to provide access to traditional sources of information. 

Although some public libraries have built support for business and 
industry, few academic libraries have done so. Dougherty (1991) has 
written recently that research libraries need to be more "user- 
responsive." Size, as he points out, is not the central concern of library 
users; access to information is. But Dougherty clearly views the clientele 
of research libraries as students and faculty. Libraries in general and 
research libraries in particular have a responsibility to society that is 
larger than this traditional definition of client implies. It is essential 
that libraries forge partnerships with business and industry that will 
provide greater benefits to our society as a whole than is possible under 
our present mode of operation. 

Networks, data in machine-readable form, and emphasis on access 
make a redefinition of our role economically feasible. Libraries of all 
types must have as their primary objective the delivery of information 
to people in all walks of life. In the words of Frederick Kilgour (1979), 
"when and where they need it" (p. 202). 

Therefore, libraries face a critical choice, one that we must make 
before it is made for us. We must either redefine the services we offer, 
the clientele we purport to serve, and the mechanisms for financing 
operations if we are to grow and prosper in the coming years; or we 
can choose to live out our declining years doing business as usual. 

For several years, telecommunication networks and computer-based 
processing have enabled libraries, especially large libraries, to choose 
between these two alternatives. Unfortunately, most have so far chosen 
the second alternative. The implications of this choice are obvious. 

Libraries must either seize the opportunity to which existing and 
planned telecommunication networks give rise, and therefore play a 
significant and major role in this country's economic development and 
global competitiveness, or live out their declining years in a caretaker 
capacity. Libraries of all types, and academic libraries in particular, 
both large and small, have an immensely important role to play in 
economic development and improvement of the general quality of life 
in this country, but that role remains to be pursued with vigor. 

Every segment of society needs information and will have it whether 
or not libraries are willing to provide it when and where needed. Let 
us seize the opportunity to redefine our organizations and our profession 
before that window of opportunity is forever closed to us. 



76 JAMES E. RUSH 



After the presentation of some background information and a look 
at the options available to business and industry for accessing 
information, a program we are planning at PALINET (Pennsylvania 
Area Library Network) to help forge alliances between our member 
libraries and business and industry in our region is outlined. 



BACKGROUND 

The idea of the virtual library, part of the title of this clinic, is 
not new. What the term implies is that libraries need not indeed, should 
not be architectural monuments or warehouses of artifacts, but sources 
of information. Data communication networks make the virtual library 
possible, as many have observed (Molholt, 1988; Battin, 1985). Few 
libraries have, however, worked hard to become virtual libraries, 
although there are some that are clearly moving in that direction, e.g., 
Pikes Peak Library District, CARL (Colorado Alliance of Research 
Libraries), Carnegie-Mellon University, Lehigh University, and 
Dartmouth College. At the same time, few automated library systems 
are adequately designed to support the virtual library, although the 
CARL, PALS (Project for Automated Library System [Unisys Corp.]), 
and Data Research Associates Inc. (DRA) ATLAS systems are at least 
partial exceptions. 

One item of concern about the condition of libraries is that it has 
taken so long for the idea of the virtual library to be spoken of openly, 
much less acted upon. The lack of vision this indicates does not bode 
well for the future of libraries. 

In a speech before a meeting of the Library Association of the 
City University of New York early in 1975, the author said, 

Libraries today are isolated, independent entities, paid for by many but 
used by few. Libraries are, in the minds of many people, equated with 
the buildings that house them. In contrast, what I envision is a single 
universal library, the union catalog of which may be found in every home. 
The technology to put a universal catalog in every home is available now. 
(Rush, 1976) 

To be sure, my vision was less than adequate, for it is not the 
catalog that is important, but the data to which the catalog points, 
and it is not only homes, but offices as well, from which access to 
the universal library may be gained. 

Six years later, the author was also the keynote speaker at an ASIS 
regional conference on "The National Library Network: Perspectives 
for the 1980's" (Rush, 1981). That speech argued that a national network 
would develop from the grass roots upward, rather than be developed 
from on "high." A seven-level national network of networks was 
proposed, a concept that grew out of work the author was doing for 



PRIVATE SECTOR 77 



INCOLSA (Indiana Cooperative Library Services Authority) in 1980 
and 1981. This conceptualization embodied distributed processing and 
distributed databases. The OCLC system, which the author helped to 
design and implement, reflected this concept, albeit within narrow 
geographical confines the system is all in one building. 

This idea of a network of networks was further refined and expanded 
upon in a paper prepared for the Library of Congress Network Advisory 
Committee at its April 23, 1983, meeting (Rush, 1983). The network 
envisioned there grew to eight levels, numbered 0-7, wherein level 
was an international (global) network, and level 1 was a national 
network. The lowest level, level 7, consisted of individual workstations, 
terminals, and small local area networks. In all of this, the emphasis 
was on the processing capabilities of nodes in the network rather than 
on the communication facilities linking processing nodes. 

Of course, that vision was not novel and was short of the mark 
in several ways, but it clearly represented a model that gradually is 
being implemented. It is gratifying that some ten to fifteen years later, 
the idea of the virtual or universal library is being taken seriously. 
However, this idea is far from being universally accepted within the 
profession. 

Today, there are many networks that fit at various levels within 
the model first presented in 1981. What is now being considered is a 
new network at level 1, the National Research and Education Network 
(NREN), ultimately to supplant, or at least impose some order on, the 
plethora of networks now operating at this level (Catlett, 1989). 



SCOPE OF THE NREN 

A network designed to link other networks on a nationwide basis 
and to provide the gateways to other nation's networks is now being 
pursued (Getz, 1989). This network, NREN, is a very important facility 
for nationwide, if not global, information access and delivery, but this 
technological marvel must not become the tail that wags the dog. It 
is not the telecommunication facility per se that is important, but the 
data that flow over it. 

Inasmuch as the NREN will cost a great deal of money to implement, 
it is appropriate, as Likins (1991) pointed out in a speech before the 
EDUCOM National NET'91 Conference, to ask, "Who benefits?" Every 
one, that is, society at large, should benefit. Research and education 
are not limited to the formalized rituals practiced in our academic 
institutions; neither are they restricted to one's years of formal education 
nor just to science and technology. Therefore, the scope of the NREN, 



78 JAMES E. RUSH 



which is already being expanded through the influence of the Coalition 
for Networked Information, needs to be broadened further to be as 
all-encompassing as possible. Likins (1991) has observed that 

in the federal budget, NREN is viewed as the academic precursor to the 
future development of a broader, privately operated national information 
infrastructure, an infrastructure which is essential to the evolution of a 
competitive US capability in the global economy. Unless consumers, 
businesses, hospitals, schools, libraries and governments are all linked 
together in a way that permits convenient and cost-effective exchange of 
all kinds of information, we will be unable to compete in a global economy 
that values knowledge and its application above all else. (p. 4) 

If the window of opportunity is opening for research libraries to 
create the universal library, then we must keep the window open for 
the private sector "companies large and small that drive our economy" 
(Likins, 1991, p. 5). 



ACCESS TO DATA BY BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY 

Many large corporations are able to afford their own in-house 
information centers. Even so, much of the information used by clients 
of these centers comes from outside sources, including other libraries. 

However, most private enterprise is carried out by small- to medium- 
sized corporations, and these organizations rarely can afford to operate 
an in-house information service. It is the small corporation that is often 
the most innovative and thus most in need of timely and accurate 
information. But it is the small corporation that can least afford to 
invest staff time and other resources to obtain the needed information 
on its own. 

It is for this reason that libraries must develop capabilities for 
providing information to business and industry. However, such 
capabilities should not be provided free of charge. Libraries must develop 
sound policies and practices for charging for information services, 
particularly when they support business and industry the private 
sector. 



PALINET MODEL FOR REGIONAL NETWORKING 

In order to assist the members of PALINET in delivering meaningful 
services to business and industry within our service area, PALINET 
is planning a three-phase development program intended to provide 
a broad spectrum of information services to our members that they 
can deliver to their clientele, with emphasis on business and industry. 
The three phases and the nature of the services each is expected to 



PRIVATE SECTOR 79 



provide are outlined in the following pages. The reader should bear 
in mind that we are just at the conceptual stage of planning, and that 
PALINET's Board of Trustees has only authorized work at this stage. 
Whether or not PALINET actually implements some or all of the plan 
is a decision that will be made by the board when the time is right. 

It should be emphasized that the services we are planning are 
intended to be delivered wholesale to our members who will, in turn, 
retail them to their clientele. PALINET has no intention of competing 
with our own members for delivery of information services within our 
service area. Rather, we want to facilitate delivery of services to business 
and industry through our members and through other libraries that 
may become members of PALINET The implications of this approach 
will become more evident later in this paper, but it should be obvious 
that larger libraries could implement a similar program unilaterally. 

Phase 1: Network Interfaces/Electronic Mail 

The first phase of our planned development is quite simple and 
straightforward. This phase involves establishment of an interface 
between the PREPnet (Pennsylvania Research and Economic 
Partnership network) and PALINET's electronic mail system, CALL 
(Computer Access Linking Libraries). This will provide all PREPnet 
users easy, quick access to a capable electronic mail service, and obviate 
the need for PREPnet to implement such a service itself. The interface 
will also permit PALINET members to communicate not only with 
other organizations in Pennsylvania but also with libraries and other 
organizations throughout the world through PREPnet's gateway into 
the Internet (Quarterman, 1990). We expect to support the free flow 
of electronic mail between other services and CALL, so that CALL 
users may send mail to people on the Internet and vice versa. This 
service will emphasize a problem in internetwork access that needs to 
be resolved soon: addressing (Ohio State, 1990). Just as ordinary voice 
telephony employs a standardized addressing scheme worldwide, so must 
our data communication networks. We cannot continue with the chaotic 
addressing situation that presently exists. 

Phase 1 establishes the communication links that will be needed 
by Phases 2 and 3. It is a relatively low-cost first step toward delivery 
of information to business and industry. 

Phase 2: Economic Development Information Service 

The second phase of our planned development is more ambitious. 
In this phase, a larger computer system would be installed, and the 



80 JAMES E. RUSH 



CALL system would be migrated to this new platform, also interfaced 
to PREPnet. In addition to electronic mail, Phase 2 would bring into 
operation an information service offering a variety of databases that 
are beneficial to economic development but that are typically difficult 
to gain access to, at least while the data are current. Such databases 
include 

census data; 

industry production data; 

real estate data (including such things as listings of commercial and 

residential real estate, title information, sales data, and the like); 

directories; 

budgets of public agencies; 

tax information; 

legislation pending and enacted; 

compensation of all public employees; 

standards and regulations; 

capital investment sources; 

grant sources for innovation; 

organizations that assist start-up companies; 

community information; 

databases created and maintained by the library; 

and much more. In addition, gateways to existing reference services, 
such as EasyNet, OCLC's EPIC Service, and DIALOG, would be 
provided. 

The most difficult aspect of this development phase will be 
establishment of a reliable supply of data from a wide variety of sources 
and establishment of working arrangements with existing reference 
services. 

In addition to database supply, Phase 2 would provide PALINET 
member libraries the opportunity to retail specialized data to business 
and industry. Access would be provided through workstations in the 
library, offices, and homes. Authorization to access the data would be 
managed by the library so that the service would appear as a library 
service rather than as a PALINET service. Moreover, the library would 
be relieved of the need to collect money, perform billing and accounting 
functions, and do other administrative chores. 

Although the library might choose to subsidize the service (a practice 
the author discourages), payment by the user would be made via deposit 
account, bank card, or credit card, all managed by PALINET. On all 
sales, the difference between the wholesale and retail prices would be 



PRIVATE SECTOR 81 



credited to the PALINET member account, and such revenue would 
then be available to the library for any purpose of the library. 

Phase 2 would establish expanded processing capacity, increased 
communication capacity, an economic development information service, 
and a mechanism for handling payment for services. 



Phase 3: Library Support Services 

Once Phase 2 is completed, it becomes a relatively simple matter 
to add support for basic library operations such as acquisitions, serials 
control, circulation control, and public catalog access. Any novelty in 
Phase 3 lies in the fact that such support would be delivered to the 
library by PALINET and charged for on a transaction basis. This is 
a concept the author proposed at OCLC in 1977 but that was never 
implemented. Nevertheless, variations on the concept have been 
implemented in several places, including Connecticut, Indiana, and 
Illinois. It is just the service bureau model with transaction charging 
rather than time and materials charging. 

The importance of this approach to providing automation support 
for library operations is that it enables even very small libraries to take 
advantage of quite robust systems at a cost commensurate with their 
needs and ability to pay. Moreover, it obviates the need for capital 
investment, system management, software and hardware upgrades, 
system replacement, and other work that is associated with owning 
and operating a computer system. In addition, it insures that all 
participants are networked. 



CONCLUSION 

If libraries are to grow and prosper in the coming years, they must 
change. One of these changes must be in the definition of the clientele 
the library purports to serve, with particular emphasis on business and 
industry. 

Libraries must cease to build physical collections and become virtual 
libraries by supporting and providing, via regional and national 
networks, access to information in electronic form. Libraries must also 
provide access to information to any and all who want or need the 
information and have the means (either direct or indirect) to pay. 

Libraries have the opportunity to serve business and industry on 
a profitable basis and should pursue this opportunity before it is seized 
by other organizations. 



82 JAMES E. RUSH 



Regional networks such as PALINET have a role to play in enabling 
libraries to achieve these objectives. The PALINET program outlined 
here could also be undertaken by larger libraries on an individual basis, 
but the services they provide must be available throughout the national 
network. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Thanks to Berry Richards, Director of Libraries at Lehigh University, for 
her generous help in preparing this paper. Of course she bears no responsibility 
for the remarks contained herein, nor should one infer that she necessarily 
agrees with them. 



REFERENCES 

Battin, P. (1985). The electronic library A vision for the future. In H. Liebaers, 

W. J. Haas, & W. E. Biervliet (Eds.), New information technologies and libraries 

(Proceedings of the Advanced Research Workshop on the Impact of New 

Information Technologies on Library Management, Resources, and Cooperation 

in Europe and North America, November 1984) (pp. 201-218). Dordrecht, The 

Netherlands: D. Reidel. 
Catlett, C. (1989). The NSFNET: Beginnings of a national research Internet. 

Academic Computing, 3(5), 18-21. 
Dougherty, R. M. (1991). Needed: User-responsive research libraries. Library Journal, 

116(1), 59-62. 
Getz, M. (1989). National Research and Education Network. Bottom Line, 3(4), 

32-35. 
Kilgour, F. G. (1979). Sharing resources in computerized systems. In H. D. L. Vervliet 

(Ed.), Resource sharing of libraries in developing countries (Proceedings of the 

1977 IFLA/UNESCO pre-session seminar for librarians from developing 

countries, 30 August-4 September 1977) (pp. 202-207). Munich: K. G. Saur. 
Koenig, M. E. D. (1990). Information services and downstream productivity. In M. 

E. Williams (Ed.), Annual review of information science and technology (Vol. 

26, pp. 55-86). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. 
Likins, P. (1991, March). Information highways: Who pays? Paper presented at the 

EDUCOM National NET'91 Conference. Washington, DC. 
McAdams, A. K.; Vietorisz, T; Dougan, W. L.; & Lombardi, J. T. (1988). Economic 

benefits and public support of a national education and research network. 

EDUCOM Bulletin, 23(2/3), 63-71. 
Molholt, P. (1988). Libraries and the new technologies: Courting the Cheshire cat. 

Library Journal, 7/3(19), 37-41. 
Ohio State offers campus e-mail that fills in the address blanks. (1990). Manage 

IT, 1(4), 1. 

PALINET News. (1988, November). 43, 6. 
Quarterman, J. S. ( 1990). The matrix: Computer networks and conferencing systems 

worldwide. Bedford, MA: Digital Press. 
Rush, J. E. (1976, April). The effect of technological innovation on libraries and 

librarianship. Paper presented before the Library Association of the City 

University of New York Meeting. 



PRIVATE SECTOR 83 



Rush, J. E. (1981, September). The national library network: A practical perspective. 

Paper presented to the ASIS Regional Conference on the National Library 

Network: Perspectives for the 1980s. Ann Arbor, MI. 
Rush, J. E. (1983, April). Computer-based library networks: What are they? How 

are they developing? Paper presented at the meeting of the Library of Congress 

Network Advisory Committee. Washington, DC. 



CHARLES E. CATLETT 

Manager, Networking Development 

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

and 

JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 

Project Lead, Networking Development 

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



The Use and Effect of Multimedia Digital 
Libraries in a National Network 



ABSTRACT 

The Internet has supported information archives for some time. These 
archives have traditionally allowed users to retrieve text and image data 
as well as software to their own computers for examination. As the 
Internet grows in scale and in performance and services, more 
sophisticated information archives and access modes are possible. This 
paper reviews the growth of the Internet with its current information 
archive services and proposes methods for providing interactive access 
to multimedia data. Various information types and their access modes 
are discussed in terms of their role in defining advanced digital library 
and network services. A prototype digital library system and user 
interface developed at the National Center for Supercomputing 
Applications is examined. 



BACKGROUND: THE GROWTH OF THE INTERNET 

The term internet means a network of networks. Our national 
network today is composed of a number of national backbone networks 



84 



MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 85 



(e.g., NSFNET, ESNet), mid-level (regional, consortium) networks, and 
campus networks. "The Internet" is a network of networks that includes 
our national network as well as other connected networks in many 
countries throughout the world. The common thread among all Internet 
components is that they operate based on the same network protocols 
and share a common addressing scheme, message forwarding (or 
"routing") schemes, etc. 

In looking at the growth of the Internet, it is helpful to look closely 
at a major component of the Internet, the NSFNET. In 1986, the National 
Science Foundation (NSF) established the NSFNET to interconnect six 
supercomputer centers at 56 kilobits per second (kb/s). At each backbone 
node, mid-level networks were established. The NSFNET architecture 
consists of a backbone network, mid-level networks to extend the 
backbone connectivity to institutions, and campus networks to extend 
the mid-level connectivity to individual local area networks (LANs). 
By 1988, these mid-level networks were providing backbone access to 
over 500 individual sites. In late 1988, the backbone was expanded to 
thirteen nodes, and the links were upgraded to 1.5 megabits per second 
(Mb/s). By the fall of 1990, the network had grown to over 2,000 sites, 
and the backbone was again upgraded to sixteen nodes interconnected 
at 45 Mb/s. 

During the past several years, a number of international links have 
been established as well, including extensive connectivity to Europe 
and the Pacific Rim. Campus networks have matured, providing access 
to many more individual computers so that now the Internet connects 
over 300,000 individual computers. Figure 1 shows the rapid growth 
of the Internet. Hosts on the network are shown from the original, 
centralized host registration at the Network Information Center (NIC) 
as well as the current decentralized registration system called the Domain 
Name System (DNS). "NSFNET Backbone Traffic" refers to the number 
of data packets that are transported across the NSFNET backbone 
network monthly. Note in particular the growth in foreign (non-U.S.) 
networks connected, the number of individual hosts, and the growth 
in the amount of data being passed over the NSFNET backbone (Smarr 
& Catlett, in press). 

It is not at all clear where or when this growth will level out. 
A large emphasis is being seen now in connecting K-12 institutions 
to the network, and the various mid-level networks are beginning to 
concentrate on marketing the network to a number of sectors including 
industry and education. 



"DIGITAL LIBRARIES" ON THE INTERNET TODAY 

A number of academic library catalog search systems are accessible 
from the Internet today. CICNet interconnects Big Ten universities and 



86 



CHARLES E. CATLETT 6- JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 



several others. The library catalog search facilities of the libraries of 
most of these universities are accessible from the network. These services 
deliver only information about where data exist but do not provide 
access to the actual data. 



1 ,000,000 
100,000-; 
10,000-1 
1,000 
100 
10 





DNS Registered Hosts , 

* 




***** ^~* E 

****** -X / "^ T 




^^ ^^ 


NIC Registered Hosts _ . ** 


W^-^ 


^ , 
_ . ' Domains 


M'MTbll T Mntr _r_ 


Total Registered Nets 


f*"^ 

/ Foreign Nets 







NSFNET 

Backbone 

Traffic 



1/83 1/84 1/85 1/86 1/87 1/88 1/89 1/90 
Figure 1. Internet growth indicators ( 1991 Catlett, Terstriep) 



Internet services that provide access to information are currently 
limited to archives reachable via file transfer and bulletin boards. An 
advantage to these services is that they are globally accessible, and the 
fact that they are heavily used in spite of their shortcomings indicates 
the demand for these services, which provide access to text, software, 
and images. Images and software as well as large text files are generally 
compressed, and the user must decompress them (once they have been 
retrieved) before using them. This makes the file opaque from the user's 
point of view. The user must also have access to the facilities required 
to run any of the available software. 

The archives that allow file transfer have a number of limitations. 
First, there are no universal indexing or naming conventions; therefore, 
it is difficult to locate items. Second, an item must be retrieved in full 
before it can be examined beyond reading the file name. Given that 
file names do not provide any significant indication of the contents 
of the item, users do not have a viable means to screen items before 
transferring them over the network to examine them. Third, there are 



MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 87 



few directories telling users where to find these archives or what is 
contained in any of them. These archives, then, are useful if one knows 
what one needs, where it is, and how it is stored. 

Bulletin boards are slightly better in that the information is 
organized in categories. There are several hundred categories generally 
accessible. However, these categories consist mainly of computer science 
and popular culture topics. Within a category, there is no index of 
contents beyond the title (subject) of the entry, the author, and the 
date. There are a number of software packages available to read these 
bulletin boards. Many are difficult to use, requiring extensive experience 
even for simple filtering of information such as searching for entries 
with a particular subject. Some of the recent access packages that run 
on Apple Macintoshes, however, provide a fairly straightforward user 
interface. 

Most computer centers operate a storage archive for their users. 
These large private collections are not generally accessible for general 
users. Those that provide general access use anonymous file transfer 
protocol (ftp) as described above. These archives cannot be ignored, 
if for no other reason than their size and growth rate. A typical major 
computing center's storage archive can grow at between 50 and 200 
Gbytes per month. 

Large-scale projects that are underway and require more 
sophisticated digital access include the Human Genome Project, the 
Hubble Space Telescope, the Earth Observing System (EOS), and the 
BIMA (Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Array) radio astronomy imaging 
consortium. In the case of the Hubble Space Telescope and the EOS, 
it is estimated that up to 1 terabyte per day will be collected. 



CONTENTS OF A MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARY 

The scientific multimedia digital library will contain a variety of 
information types. Table la shows the approximate size of various types 
of data. This table includes individual items, such as images or journal 
articles, and their average sizes. From the size, one can calculate the 
network throughput required to retrieve them in a fixed amount of 
time. Sequences of data such as image sequences, audio, etc., are shown 
in Table Ib along with the approximate network throughput required 
to transmit them. 

In addition to standard types of data such as those shown in Tables 
la and Ib, the scientific multimedia digital library also contains data 
sets generated by applications such as numerical models. Direct access 
to data sets would allow scientists to verify the conclusions of their 
colleagues by examining the data firsthand. Also, for such applications 



88 CHARLES E. CATLETT b JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 



as global climate models that require hundreds of hours of 
supercomputer time to run, a number of users will want to "mine" 
or explore the data. 

TABLE 1A 

VARIOUS ITEMS (AND THEIR SIZES) 
FOUND IN A MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARY* 

Item Size Calculation Size in Bits 

Journal articles, papers, etc. 
(avg. 5 pages) 

Plain text 5 kbyte/pg. X 5 pg. avg. 25 kbytes 

Formatted text 10% overhead to text 28 kbytes 

= 5.5 kbyte/pg. X 5 pg. avg. 
Scanned page images 300 dpi X 7.5 in. X 10 in. 5 Mbytes 

= 1 Mbyte/pg. X 5 pg. avg. 

Single images 

Color NTSC 512 X 512 X 8 bits .26 Mbytes 

G4 FAX 1.7 k X 2.2 kbits .5 Mbytes 

Gray-scale 2 k X 2 k X 8 bits 4 Mbytes 

Color 2 k X 2 k X 24 bits 12 Mbytes 

*Calculations on the average size of each item are shown as well as the size. 

TABLE IB 

SEQUENCES OF DATA AND APPROXIMATE NETWORK 
THROUGHPUT TO TRANSMIT 



Sequences 


Heading 


Required 
Throughput 


Audio 
Low fidelity 
High fidelity 


Sampling rate 
Sampling rate 


.064 Mb/s 
.64 Mb/s 



High-definition TV* 

Production quality Minimal compression, 

30 frames/second 1-2 Gb/s 

Post-production quality Modest compression 200 Mb/s 

Distribution quality Compression with information 20 Mb/s 

loss 
NTSC quality Compression with information 5 Mb/s 

and visual loss 

VCR quality Compression with significant 1.5 Mb/s 

information, visual loss 

HDTV compression rates are from Glenn Reitmeier, Director, High-Definition Imaging 
and Computing Laboratory, David Sarnoff Research Center. 

The scientist will want to examine the data in a number of ways, 
including extracting portions of information at the byte level. It is critical 



MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 89 



that the data be stored in such a way that their format and contents 
can be later ascertained. There are a number of data file formats that 
are generally used in the computation science community. These formats 
incorporate a standard header describing the contents of the data file 
as well as access software for reading, writing, and interpreting the 
headers. Self-describing data formats might also contain references to 
data analysis software or perhaps copies of appropriate access and 
analysis subroutine object code and source code. 

The multimedia digital library might also store programs that 
generate the data rather than the actual data. For example, periodic 
complete state information (checkpoints) of a long global climate model 
might be more convenient to examine than the multiple terabytes of 
data that the model could generate. In this case, the user will generate 
the data "on-the-fly" by starting up the model at some point in the 
model's cycle. 

Images and sequences of images will be stored in the multimedia 
digital library as shown in Tables la and Ib. Note that the output 
from a data generator application could also be a sequence of images 
such as this. Scientists require at least distribution quality imagery for 
serious examination, although lower quality may suffice for cursory 
examination or observation of large-scale phenomena (e.g., weather 
patterns in a climate model). 



THE SCIENTIFIC DATA MANAGEMENT FACILITY 



A Prototype Multimedia Digital Library 

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is 
developing multimedia digital library services for a number of projects, 
including the implementation of a central archive for the BIMA project, 
storing scores of data sets and images collected by the Hat Creek 
millimeter array radio telescope. The intent of much of this work is 
to explore the provision of interactive access to the types of objects 
that a scientist would find useful in a multimedia digital library. 

A prototype has been designed based on several fundamental 
components of a multimedia digital library aimed at providing access 
to information used by computational scientists. The data involve 
multiple formats and media types. The data will be distributed, will 
in many cases be pre-existing, and thus will have a set format and storage 
type and must be accessed in that way. 

Two major components make up the digital library: directory 
services and data access. The digital library can be accessed using a 



90 CHARLES E. CATLETT b JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 



variety of applications, including, for example, user interfaces with 
browsing and examining capabilities and data analysis packages to 
examine data. 

An indexing system or directory service is needed to provide a catalog 
of location and, preferably, format/type information for the distributed 
data archives. This function is essentially a database with information 
about the location of data items, the type of data, and the format of 
the data. This component is a database. 

A mechanism for locating data is needed to access the digital library; 
this will query the directory database. Mechanisms for browsing data 
and for examining data are necessary. The mechanisms will differ for 
the various data formats and media types. In the case of data generators 
(programs) in the digital library, index entries include information about 
where the data generator will be executed. 

Figure 2 illustrates the functional components of the digital library 
as implemented in a prototype that was demonstrated during March 
1991 at National NET'91 in Washington, DC. This includes the user 
interface with browsing and examination applications as well as the 
directory and data archive components. Figure 2 also includes multiple 
archives with multiple item types, including data generators and the 
use of data analysis filters. 

The scientific digital library prototype has several indexes and 
several data archives, and some indexes reference multiple archives. The 
user interface sends queries to one or more indexes. The queries result 
in lists of relevant items sent to the user, each with one-line description, 
author, creation date, data type, and a pointer to the actual location 
of the item on the network. 

Depending on the item type, the user is given a choice of 
examination/browsing options. For example, text can be examined with 
a text editor, and scientific data sets can be examined using a number 
of data analysis tools. When the user chooses one of the tools, the interface 
automatically starts up the analysis tool for the user and informs the 
tool of the location of the data set. In the case of data generators, a 
choice of data analysis tools is given for use as the user interface for 
control and viewing of the process. Users can also elect to transfer a 
copy of the item to local disk; however, many examine options involve 
use of the item at its original location. The list of items can also be 
saved to local disk. 



NETWORK ARCHITECTURES, PROTOCOLS, 
AND MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 

The nature of access to the data in a multimedia digital library 
greatly affects the network architectures and protocols required. At the 



MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 



91 



same time, network architecture and also resource billing schemes will 
determine what are the most cost-effective access methods and thus will 
affect the way users access data. 




Figure 2. Model used to build the NCSA multimedia digital library prototype 
( 1991 Catlett, Terstriep) 



For access to remote data over the network, existing Internet archives 
allow for limited browsing and examination of text (using bulletin 
boards) but only for retrieving most data (images, large text files, 
software) to local disk to examine or browse. The multimedia digital 
library must support remote access to data as many of the items will 
be too large for the amount of disk available locally to the user and 
many of the items will require access to facilities (e.g., supercomputers) 
that do not reside with the user. 

To access data remotely without retrieving the data to local disk 
in total, a number of types of access can be supported. The popular 
Network File System (NFS) protocol from Sun Microsystems allows 
files on remote disk to appear as though they are on local disk. This 
is done by allowing the user to access the files in subunits (transparent 
to the user) called blocks. However, if the user only requires a particular 



92 CHARLES E. CATLETT 6- JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 



record or byte (perhaps every nth byte), NFS still sends the data in 
blocks, and the subunits are extracted from the blocks by the user's 
workstation. 

In some cases, it may be more suitable to allow the user's application 
to extract information from the remote file by individual bytes rather 
than blocks. In other cases, a user will want a whole group of items 
(e.g., files) to be sent to the local workstation so that they can be 
manipulated locally. 

Each of these remote access methods groups of files, whole files, 
blocks, bytes dictates requirements on the network supporting the 
access. For example, where text or images are being browsed, the user 
should be able to "flip" through several pages per second. This may 
be most easily done by retrieving in total the entire file or group of 
files to be browsed. For image sequences, however, the entire image 
sequence may be too large to fit on the user's disk and must be accessed 
in parts. Images could be sent over the network in sequence, requiring 
isochronous, in-order delivery. In this case, lost or damaged images 
or portions of images will be better skipped than retransmitted. To 
provide isochronous viewing, groups of images could be sent over the 
network and played locally, with a number of images waiting to be 
viewed at the local workstation at any given time. This would allow 
the workstation to deliver the images at a constant rate, relaxing the 
requirement of the network to do so. In addition, a queue of images 
at the local workstation may provide enough time to retransmit lost 
or damaged images. 

It is important to note that delivery of information at a constant 
rate in the presence of any errors will come at a cost of reliable delivery 
of all information. This is because error correction measures such as 
retransmission come at a cost of delays, and these delays may cause 
more disruption in the image stream than the error they are meant 
to correct in the first place. 

When viewing a sequence of images, part of the information that 
is contained is the development of features in time. Thus delivery of 
the information at a rate that distorts the time element will deliver 
incorrect information to the user. 

The billing algorithms of the network will also drive the way that 
the data are accessed. An example of this effect can be seen in the delivery 
of electronic mail. When mail is delivered using dial-up phone circuits 
such as with UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX copy protocol), the cost of delivery 
is dependent upon a circuit setup cost and a time-sensitive usage cost. 
Therefore, to minimize the number of calls and the length of calls, 
electronic mail is queued and sent periodically. Internet mail delivery 
systems such as SMTP (simple mail transport protocol) assume that 
there is no cost to setting up circuits or in usage. Therefore, to minimize 



MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 93 



delay in mail delivery, each mail message is delivered as soon as it 
is submitted. The result is that Internet mail is much more interactive 
than UUCP because of the cost structure of the underlying network 
services rather than because of any technical considerations. 

The current Internet cost structure is a fixed cost, not sensitive to 
usage. The fixed cost generally involves the cost of equipment at 
installation time, the cost of leasing telecommunications circuits, and 
some cost for maintaining an operations staff locally and/or at a central 
network operations center. In this environment, a multimedia digital 
library might download small items for local examination and access 
large items remotely. The difference between large and small will be 
determined by the capacity of the network, the amount of local storage 
space, and the amount of time the user is willing to wait while 
information is retrieved. With time-sensitive network connections such 
as a circuit-switched (dial-up, ISDN) connection, the trade-off will also 
include the cost of keeping the circuit up for large retrieval and the 
cost of keeping the circuit up for long sessions of remote data 
examination. 



DATA GENERATORS: HIGH-PERFORMANCE APPLICATIONS 

Several high-performance applications are described below. These 
applications have intensive network requirements. The multimedia 
digital library prototype described above allows users to access these 
types of applications; therefore, they must be taken into account in 
assessing the effect of multimedia digital libraries on a network. 

Radio Astronomy 

The Hat Creek radio telescope collects information at 2,048 
frequencies. The telescope data must be converted into visual images 
using computational image-processing techniques. Supercomputers are 
used for this, acting as the image-forming element of the telescope. 
The conversion involves a calibration calculation to filter out much 
of the interference caused by atmospheric anomalies, then a FFT (Fast 
Fourier Transform) to convert the raw telescope output data into images. 
For each frequency, a two-dimensional image is produced. Thus the 
image output to a radio telescope is a spectral cube, with two spatial 
dimensions and one spectral dimension. In the case of the Hat Creek 
array, this cube is 2,048 frequencies by up to 4,096 horizontal and 4,096 
vertical pixels with each pixel being 16 to 24 bits. For example, a 2,048 
by 2,048 spatial size with 24 bits per pixel would involve the following 
amount of data: 



94 CHARLES E. CATLETT b JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 



2,048 frequencies -2,048X2,048 pixels/frequency .24 bits/ 
pixel 1 byte/8 bits = ~26 gigabytes. 

Reconstruction of these image cubes from the data requires real- 
time interaction by a scientist who observes roughly two to five images 
per second being displayed. Typically, one spectral image is used in 
this process, and the scientist will watch the image reconstruction as 
the nonlinear deconvolution either converges on an image or begins 
to diverge, indicating the need to stop the process and restart after 
adjusting gain parameters. Analysis of the resulting spectral cube 
involves traversing both the spatial dimensions and the spectral 
dimensions. 

Data are collected continuously by the telescope and are integrated 
over time to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. The integration time, 
generally measured in tenths of seconds to tens of seconds, is determined 
as a function of the signal strength of the object being observed. Where 
very long integration times are used, the telescope would not necessarily 
be steered in real time. Short integration times are generally desired 
for real-time observation. 

Several classes of observation require these images to be produced 
in real time for interactive steering of the telescope. The integration 
time would be on the order of tenths of seconds to several seconds. 
These classes include observation of time-variable phenomena such as 
solar activity, a technique called "mosaic-ing" (where short observations 
are made on a number of small regions and then reconstructed into 
a larger image later), and in cases where the atmospheric changes, which 
happen on the order of seconds, are kept to a minimum. 

A prototype that was demonstrated by BIMA scientists at NCSA 
recently involved the functional decomposition of this type of system, 
using both the CRAY Y-MP for the baseline calculation and the massively 
parallel CM-2 for the FFT. By spreading the computation across several 
supercomputers, the speed of the computation increased significantly. 

Atmospheric Sciences 

Interactive visualization systems involve both analysis of 
precomputed data and analysis of running simulations. For the analysis 
of precomputed data, a supercomputer is used to render thunderstorm 
data using surfaces, contour plots, massive particle releases, and slices. 
The supercomputer simulation involves calculating the evolution of 
a weather system for a region of the atmosphere. For example, a region 
that is 100 km long by 50 km wide and 30 km high is subdivided into 



MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 



95 



a grid of zones, each zone perhaps 1 km by 1 km by 500 meters. Several 
variables are associated with each of these zones, including temperature, 
pressure, and velocity vectors. The supercomputer simulation involves 
using the laws of physics to compute the evolution of these variables 
over a period of time from some beginning state. A typical simulation 
as described above has over 1 million zones, each with nine variables. 
The variables are stored in 8-by te fields, thus the amount of data required 
to represent one moment in the storm evolution is 

~1,000,000 zones 9 variables/zone 8 bytes/variable = 72 
megabytes. 



CRflV-2 

(Baseline 
Calculation) 




Figure 3. Prototype radio astronomy application that was developed using 
both the CRAY-2 and the CM-2 to interactively evaluate the frequency 
response of a given radio telescope antenna configuration 



The resolution shown above, with each zone representing an area 
1 km by 1 km by 500 meters, is not high enough to study small-scale 
phenomena such as tornados. In order to reduce the zone size for this 
scale of activity, the number of zones would increase beyond the capacity 
of any available supercomputer memory, and the amount of time it 



96 



CHARLES E. CATLETT b JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 



would take to calculate all of the variables for even a single moment 
in time would exceed the compute power of even the fastest current 
supercomputers. To address the need for higher resolution, interactive 
systems are being developed to allow the scientist to intervene in the 
running simulation and request a higher or lower resolution in portions 
of the simulated storm system. This will allow for increasing resolution 
in those areas with high activity without increasing the overall size 
of the simulation beyond feasible limits. 

These types of applications are also being distributed over multiple 
computers to increase the computation rate. A current project involves 
the use of multiple RS/6000 workstations at NCSA to compute the 
model. Early studies have yielded a three-fold decrease in turnaround 
time when comparing one RS/6000 to using six in parallel, even for 
relatively small model sizes. 



CM-2 

(Dynamics) 



Coupled 

Global/Regional 

Model 



PMET 

(Physics) 




Figure 4. Coupled global/regional climate model using the PMET at 
Wisconsin and the CM-2 at Illinois 



MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL LIBRARIES 



97 



Biomedical Imaging 

The Distributed Biomedical Imaging Laboratory (DBIL) is a testbed 
to integrate imaging instrumentation used in biomedical research with 
remote high-performance computing environments. DBIL is a joint 
project between NCSA and the University of Illinois Biomedical 
Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, with remote collaborators at Lawrence 
Berkeley Laboratories. 

One application that has been demonstrated is the use of a CRAY- 
2 and CM-2 for 3D image reconstruction simultaneously during data 
acquisition from a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging spectrometer. 



Library 
Browser/Searcher 




LBL 



Figure 5. Distributed Biomedical Imaging Laboratory application 



The reconstructed volumetric image is then sent to a CM-2 for volume 
analysis and visualization in a distributed display environment. The 
CRAY-2 image reconstruction takes roughly 0.05 seconds for each 
projection, and after one to one hundred projections are calculated, 
the volume of data (up to several megabytes) is sent to the CM-2. The 
processes run continuously for the duration of the experiment (10 to 
60 minutes). 



98 CHARLES E. CATLETT b JEFFREY A. TERSTRIEP 



This original system allowed 3D rendering of a static image a 
3D snapshot. The system that has recently been demonstrated allows 
3D rendering of a dynamic image a 3D movie. Using this system, a 
frog egg will be observed over a 24-hour period to yield a 3D movie 
of cell multiplication. 



REFERENCE 

Smarr, L. L., & Catlett, C. E. (in press). Life after Internet: Making room for new 
applications. In B. Kahin (Ed.), Building an information infrastructure. New York: 
McGraw-Hill. 



M. E. L. JACOB 

M. E. L. Jacob Associates 
Columbus, Ohio 



Networking Applications 
for Research Libraries* 



ABSTRACT 

This panel consisted of four speakers who are involved with a number 
of different network applications: Steve Cisler of Apple Computer, 
Clifford A. Lynch of the University of California at Oakland, Ward 
Shaw of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL), and 
Bernard G. Sloan of the Illinois Library Computer Systems Office 
(ILCSO). The panel was chaired by M. E. L. Jacobs and encompasses 
some eighty-two years of combined networking experience. 



INTRODUCTION 

Jacobs began the discussion by highlighting several themes that 
had been raised in preceding papers. Among these were how and why 
people communicate, public rights versus property rights, and where 
system boundaries are drawn. 

How and Why People Communicate 

Today we suffer information paralysis brought on by access to diverse 
sources of overlapping, redundant information, with little assistance 
to the user in identifying unique pieces of data or in sifting through 



This paper is a summary of the panel discussion titled "Networking Applications for 
Research Libraries." 

99 



100 Af . . L. JACOB 



the masses of data to locate either the best or, at least, the most appropriate 
piece for that particular purpose. We need to better understand why 
and how scholars and other information users communicate and how 
they seek and use information. Most scholars tend to ask one another, 
not use library and information centers, because it is easier. In addition, 
their colleagues will also provide a brief critique or analysis of the 
strengths and weaknesses of the research or of the researcher's methods. 
Students, on the other hand, use libraries more, often want one 
or two relevant references, and are less concerned with the best references 
or the more exhaustive search. In other words, they want usable 
information immediately. Librarians and information professionals 
must suit their approach and the results sought to the needs of the 
requester; they must also be willing to take more responsibility in 
assessing information, in giving qualitative judgments, and in providing 
digested information instead of a list of articles or copies of all articles. 

Public Rights versus Property Rights 

Public rights and property rights must be balanced. Just because 
technology makes it easy to obtain copies and to manipulate data does 
not abrogate property rights of the individual or of the corporation. 
Public policy must find ways to continue to promote the unfettered 
exchange of information while at the same time encouraging innovation 
by providing economic incentives to creators and distributors of 
information. Networks must be able to offer both free services and 
commercial services and must provide adequate protection and 
recompense to each. 

System Boundaries 

The third aspect of networking applications, where system 
boundaries are drawn, can complicate solutions and end with suboptimal 
systems if the boundaries are drawn too narrowly. Information providers 
and information systems designers must look at the entire information 
cycle from creation through publication, distribution, storage, and 
retrieval to use and then to create further information. Looking only 
at publication and distribution may be ignoring other important 
consequences. 

For example, why doesn't the Library of Congress Office of 
Copyright Deposit accept books in both print and machine-readable 
form? Almost all manuscripts today are produced via electronic 
typesetting. When a new edition is contemplated, the depository could 
provide the publisher and author with an electronic version of the 
manuscript. Too often today, a revision starts from scratch with the 



NETWORKING APPLICATIONS 101 



text rekeyed. Electronic manuscripts would also be an asset to scholars 
studying various writers and writing styles as well as book design. 



THE SPEAKERS 

Steve Cisler 

Senior Scientist, Apple Computer Library 

Cisler described the recent reorganization of Apple Computer and 
the place of the Apple Computer Library as part of the Advanced 
Technology Group. He also mentioned a number of projects outside 
Apple using Apple equipment. The University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 
has an oral history project to place data in digital form on CD-ROM. 
Project Jukebox will eventually provide access to these data via their 
network. North Carolina State University and the National Agricultural 
Library (NAL) are experimenting with sending images via the Internet 
as part of NAL's text digitizing project. Also described and demonstrated 
was some innovative software, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) 
Station, for organizing and storing mixed media information developed 
by the staff of Thinking Machines Incorporated in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, and made available free to researchers for 
experimentation. 

Clifford A. Lynch 

Director of Library Automation, 
University of California at Oakland 

Lynch described the University of California's use of that same 
software WAIS Station in an application that was up and operating 
in ten days. He also raised issues about some things libraries could 
be doing and were not. 

For example, although most libraries now have online catalogs, 
few are available on or linked to the campus local area networks (LANs). 
Lynch emphasized that they should be. In a related example, electronic 
mail is an easy application to mount and use, yet few libraries have 
taken advantage of it to communicate with users. Search results could 
be mailed electronically instead of by campus mail or by forcing users 
to come to the library to pick them up. Printing has become a nightmare 
for many libraries, and soon, full text will increase printing demands. 
Lynch suggested working with departmental units or other campus 
resources to make hard-copy results available to users in their 
departments or dormitories. Ultimately, libraries should be able to 



102 M. E. L. JACOB 



deliver printed output over the campus LAN to the individual's 
workstation. 

Another problem is authorization and resource control. Ensuring 
that only valid users have access to resources is not easy. Presently, users 
must obtain different cards and authorizations for different functions 
such as libraries, student unions, bookstores, and computers. In the 
case of limited resources such as high-quality color printers, how is 
access controlled and limited? With more network users, particularly 
remote users, questions of authorization and resource control will 
become critical. 

Present network directories indicate what resources exist, but they 
do not provide much assistance in accessing them. This is an area where 
libraries and librarians could help. They should also consider providing 
systems that would supply full text along with citations if articles were 
located anywhere on the network. 

Ward Shaw 

President and CEO, Colorado Alliance of 
Research Libraries (CARL) 

Shaw suggested that name authority files are the place to carry 
authorizations. He then described the difference between CARL, a not- 
for-profit organization, and CARL Systems, a for-profit related 
corporation that markets and sells services developed by or for CARL. 
CARL has over 11 million bibliographic records, 4,500 terminals, and 
175 databases as part of its online system available on the Internet. 
UNCOVER provides access to serials' tables of contents and is the third 
most popular CARL service. UNCOVER II, a full-text delivery service, 
will be introduced in summer 1991. Fax transmission will be used, and 
the bit-mapped images will be stored for later reuse. CARL Systems 
will pay royalty fees for articles delivered. 

Shaw then raised two problems that occur when offering services: 
(a) whom to ask for permission and (b) whom to blame when things 
go wrong. Locating serials' publishers and obtaining permission to use 
serials' tables of contents have not been easy. Shaw indicated that, 
sometimes, it is easier to do something first and ask later. The second 
problem, troubleshooting, is also a major challenge in networked 
systems. Identifying the particular piece of equipment or line of software 
code responsible for a problem is not easy. Once the fault has been 
identified, the problem then becomes identifying who is responsible 
for fixing it. End-users need a lot of guidance in matching their needs 
to systems and equipment. 



NETWORKING APPLICATIONS 103 



Local system vendors do not know a lot about connectivity. 
Although users talk about it, few really demand it or are willing to 
pay for it. Not all libraries want to be connected to networks. Some 
fear that users will demand too much, swamping existing systems, 
collections, and personnel. Others fear that inadequacies in these will 
become more apparent to users under networking. 

Bernard G. Sloan 

Director, Illinois Library Computer Systems Office (ILCSO) 

Sloan described ILLINET (Illinois Library Network) Online, which 
provides an online catalog and circulation system for thirty-eight 
libraries: nineteen private colleges, thirteen state universities, four 
community colleges, one high school library, and the Illinois State 
Library. Some 1,400 terminals access the 20 million holdings on the 
system. Three hundred and seventy-two libraries use the system: 58 
percent public, 22 percent academic, 13 percent school, and 7 percent 
special libraries. Seventy-five percent of the $4.3 million funding comes 
from the Illinois Board of Higher Education, 10 percent from the state 
library, and 15 percent from ILCSO. Connections to the Internet are 
planned, and introduction of the BRS workstation software is underway. 
Databases being considered are Wilson, Information Access Corporation, 
and University Microfilms Incorporated. 



CONCLUSION 

A lively discussion with the audience ensued with a number of 
questions on the software demonstrated by Steve Cisler. One participant 
suggested that libraries should allow users to annotate bibliographic 
records with notes. Another remarked that this feature was provided 
in the late 1960s and early 1970s by MIT's Project INTREX and that 
Carnegie-Mellon was using electronic mail to communicate with its 
online catalog users. 



MARTIN RUNKLE 

Director, University of Chicago Library 
Chicago, Illinois 



The Changing Economics of Research Libraries 



ABSTRACT 

This paper discusses, from the viewpoint of a library administrator, 
the economic and funding problems raised by the involvement of 
academic libraries in networks. With increased access to electronic 
information provided by networks, librarians must be involved with 
planning what will be available on the network. In addition, a structure 
is needed to facilitate collaboration among various members of the 
university community to manage the system. Given the development 
of electronic information technology and libraries' limited financial 
resources, librarians must budget for expenditures related to providing 
electronic information as well as expenditures related to providing access 
to traditional materials. Librarians will have to determine priorities, 
scrutinize budgets, and consider alternatives for reallocating money. 



INTRODUCTION 

The title of this paper was suggested by the title of Martin 
Cummings's (1986) book, The Economics of Research Libraries. This 
book was the result of a two-year effort that was organized by the Council 
on Library Resources and involved a number of people and some 
commissioned studies. Cummings asserted that "we know little about 
the economics of research libraries or the relationship of library budget 
decisions to the felt needs of users" (p. 12). Our knowledge of the 
economics of research libraries has not improved much since this book 
was published, and, in fact, the picture has become more complex. 



104 



CHANGING ECONOMICS 105 



A few years ago, the provost of the University of Chicago (UC) 
began a budget address to the faculty with the statement, "To budget 
is to choose." Though this is an exciting time for librarians, we are 
faced with very difficult budget choices. The choices center mainly on 
trying to maintain the traditional library while incorporating new 
information technology. 

It is difficult to judge whether or not today's economic constraints 
are that much different from those of difficult periods in the past, but 
we are all familiar with what has been happening recently to the price 
of publications that are of interest to research libraries. 

Figure 1 is taken from ARL Statistics, 1989-90 (Stubbs, 1991, p. 
6). The graph shows that median serials expenditures of ARL libraries 
rose 52 percent from 1986 to 1990. In the same four years, the median 
price per subscription rose 51 percent, while the median number of 
subscriptions decreased by only 1 percent. 

For monographs, the numbers are even more troubling. In spite 
of a 19 percent increase in expenditures for monographs during this 
period, the number of monographs purchased dropped 16 percent. Serials 
were protected to a great extent at the expense of monographs, and 
libraries have been acquiring an increasingly smaller portion of what 
is being published. At the same time, patrons' expectations regarding 
access to traditional information sources have been rising, and the 
volume of interlibrary lending has increased dramatically. 



INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: PROMISES AND PROBLEMS 

There are some truly exciting advances in information technology 
and the promise of networking end-user access from offices and homes 
to a vast array of bibliographic, textual, numeric, and graphic 
information, as well as new forms of information structured in 
multidimensional ways previously not possible and approaching the 
metaphysical. One of the new developments is something called "virtual 
reality." 

UC has not gone nearly as far as some other universities in providing 
access to electronic information through networking, but it is fairly 
typical. We have a high-speed campus network that is being extended 
to most campus buildings. It connects with external networks and is 
heavily used by some faculty and students. Although the library's online 
catalog is available on this network, except for law databases and what 
is freely available on the Internet, we do not provide end-user access 
to other databases on the campus network. Most faculty and students 
do not use the campus network because they are not familiar with its 
capabilities, and, besides, it is not very user-friendly. 



106 



MARTIN RUNKLE 



60% - 



C 
h 
a 
n 

9 
e 



40% -i 



20% 1 




Serial Expenditures ( + 52%) 
Serial Unit Price ( + 51%) 

Monograph Unit Price (*41%) 



Mono. Expenditures ( + 19%) 



-20% - 



Serial Titles 
Purchased (-1%) 



Monograph Volumes 
Purchased (-16%) 



-40% 



1986 



1992 



1988 1990 

Fiscal Year 
Figure 1. Monograph and serial costs in ARL libraries, 1985-86 1989-90 

For the time being, most of the faculty and students do not know 
what they are missing. But that will soon change. As word spreads 
and as faculty and graduate students come to our university from other 
institutions that are ahead of us, the pressure will mount for us to 
do more, and we will be obliged to do more to remain competitive, 
as well as merely to do our jobs. 

It is troubling to observe that an increasing number of students, 
and even faculty, at UC and one must assume at other universities 
are inclined not to use the card catalog. Their research is being shaped 
and limited by what they find in the online catalog. Even the most 
conscientious of scholars can drift onto the path of least resistance, 
and in order not to allow the past to be overlooked, research libraries 



CHANGING ECONOMICS 107 



must place a high priority on converting card catalogs to machine- 
readable form. 

A similar phenomenon relates to electronic indexing and abstracting 
services when these databases contain entries only for recent years. As 
more textual and other information becomes available in electronic form, 
the trend toward regarding only relatively current information will 
become even more pronounced. 

Though electronic information technology has moved at an amazing 
pace, publications distributed in traditional formats will be with us 
for a while, and university libraries will continue to manage these 
formats for the foreseeable future. As one grows older, it becomes easier 
and easier to predict with great assurance that certain things will not 
occur in one's lifetime. When the author visits his library's binding 
and labeling department and sees just one day's worth of the printed 
volumes that are acquired from all over the world, he knows that most 
of them will not be superseded by electronic formats in his lifetime. 
We are obligated to preserve these collections, build on them, and 
facilitate their use. Unfortunately, it will become increasingly difficult 
to do so as we divert more resources to new information technology. 

WHO PAYS? 

How have we been paying for the new technology up to now? 
Access to electronic information using video display screens was 
introduced in academic libraries in the mid-1970s and became common 
by 1980. Since the mid-1970s, academic library budgets have increased 
steadily. There have been studies that attempt to determine the effect 
of the increases in terms of actual purchasing power, but the conclusions 
are not definitive. Regardless of the actual value of the increases, they 
have been, on average, substantial both in percentages and in absolute 
dollars. Many academic institutions have stretched themselves to support 
their libraries. 

The breakdown of expenditures of ARL libraries suggests some 
interesting trends in the past fifteen years. Even allowing for some 
inconsistencies in what has been included by libraries in the various 
categories, some trends are evident. 

At the author's request, Kendon Stubbs updated a graph that 
originally appeared in the 1983/84 ARL Statistics (Daval 8c Lichtenstein, 
1985, p. 4). The updated graph shows the percentage of change in selected 
categories of ARL statistics for the fifteen years from 1976 through 1990. 
These data are for the ninety libraries that reported data in all fifteen 
years. Using 1976 as a base, the figures show the following changes: 



108 



MARTIN RUNKLE 



Serials expenditures 325 percent 

Other operating and binding expenditures 322 percent 

Salaries and wages 169 percent 

Nonserial acquisitions expenditures 156 percent 

Volumes held 48 percent 

Current serials received 16 percent 

Total professional and nonprofessional staff 11 percent 

Gross volumes added per year -6 percent 



350% r 



e J 
Other Operating 



it* and Wage* 
Non-Strlal Material* 




-50% 



1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 

Fiscal Year 

Figure 2. Aggregated expenditures and resources of 90 ARL university 
libraries, 1975-761989-90 



The "other operating and binding expenditures" have increased 
at a much faster rate than total acquisitions or staff expenditures. As 



CHANGING ECONOMICS 109 



other people have suggested, it seems likely that the disproportionate 
growth of these other expenditures represents increases related to 
automation and access to electronic information expenses such as 
equipment, licensing and user fees of various sorts, and telecom- 
munications costs. If some libraries are paying some of such expenses 
from acquisitions budgets, the differences in the growth of the various 
categories are even greater than the graph shows. 

Other added expenditures associated with providing electronic 
information are staff costs. These are for systems staff who are dedicated 
to providing the technology, as contrasted to staff who use the technology 
such as reference librarians and catalogers. These new staff undoubtedly 
account for some of the increase in staff size. 

It is likely that some of the increase in library budgets in the past 
fifteen years has been earmarked for information technology by the 
parent institutions and would not otherwise have been allocated to 
libraries. It is also likely, however, that some money that would have 
gone to acquisitions budgets for traditional formats has gone to 
information technology instead. In other words, acquisitions budgets 
for traditional formats have been squeezed. 

Not all expenditures for information technology are revealed in 
individual library budgets. State systems of higher education have funded 
systemwide capabilities. And in many institutions, the costs of library 
processing systems and of providing access to electronic databases have 
been at least partially supported through the budgets of university 
computing organizations or academic departments. 

But what of the future? As we are faced with system replacement 
costs and as expectations, technical possibilities, and costs continue to 
rise, how are we going to pay for it all? Obviously, we cannot afford 
to pay for it all, and we will have to make choices. 

THE "IDEAL" LIBRARY 

Libraries are often described as bottomless pits. There seems no 
limit to the amount of money that could be spent on them, and this 
is because of the traditional ideal of an academic library an ideal that 
never could be fully realized but that everyone wishes for, nevertheless. 
The following list suggests a few of the characteristics of the ideal library 
of twenty years ago an ideal that for the most part is still held today. 

The time between publication of an item and its bibliographical and 
physical availability in the library should be as short as humanly 
possible. 

Catalog records should be thorough and accurate and have many 
access points. 



1 10 MARTIN R UNKLE 



There should be several comprehensive catalogs, as well as smaller 
catalogs that are subject-specific. 

The catalogs should contain article-specific entries for journals. 

The library should be open 24 hours a day. 

There should be subject specialist librarians in all disciplines and 
languages to select materials for the collections and to help people 
find what they need. 

Reference desks and circulation counters should be open all the hours 
the library is open and should be sufficiently staffed so that people 
do not have to wait for service. 

When books are returned from circulation, they should be reshelved 
within minutes. 

Stacks should be kept in good order and shelf- read frequently. 

Lost, misplaced, or damaged materials should be replaced promptly. 

On those few occasions when something needed is not in the local 
collections, it should be retrievable from another library in a timely 
way, preferably within hours. 

All materials in the collections should be physically arranged by 
subject classification numbers. There should be multiple copies with 
different numbers when various class numbers apply to the item. 

The library should acquire all of the publications that might be needed 
for the university's programs of education and research, with at least 
two copies of each title so that one can be noncirculating and always 
available on the shelves. Additional copies should be made available 
when demand is expected to be heavy. For some disciplines, 
departmental libraries should contain a duplicate subset of what is 
in main libraries. 

There should be no microfilm. Everything should be in hard copy. 

The point of this potentially infinite list is that there has always 
been a set of impossible standards that people have consciously or 
unconsciously used in judging a library. Libraries are always less than 
people wish them to be. The job of the librarian has been to negotiate 
compromises and to convince people that the compromises are 
reasonable, that financial resources are being spent wisely, and that 
the various constituencies are being fairly served. This job is becoming 
increasingly difficult. 

Today's online library catalogs are coming closer to, and even 
surpassing, the ideal configuration of card catalogs that was fantasized 
twenty years ago. Electronic information and networking capabilities 
open up the possibility of someday achieving and even surpassing the 
other ideals in the list. The technology seems to be within reach, and 
we are all eager to make this possibility a reality. Our expectations 
are higher, and the gap between expectations and reality is even greater. 



CHANGING ECONOMICS 1 1 1 



In making budget decisions, librarians have always had to consult 
widely and negotiate among competing, sometimes conflicting, 
demands. But the emergence of electronic information in a network 
environment has made it far more difficult to manage the decision- 
making process. Many of the historical precedents do not apply to our 
new environment, and, more than ever before, the decisions require 
broadly based deliberation and consultation within the institution, and 
the decisions also require accountability regarding the choices that are 
made. In many institutions, the political and economic path to changing 
over to an online catalog was a rocky and precarious one. The road 
to the electronic library will be even more treacherous. 



PLANNING FOR THE NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 

The terms information technology and networks have been used 
here rather loosely. Libraries began developing in-house automated 
circulation and processing systems in the late 1960s and gradually moved 
toward online catalogs for patron access. These systems are focused on 
managing the local collections and supporting the operations of the 
library. Planning the systems, securing the funding for them, and 
insuring that they are put in place and maintained are clearly the 
responsibility of the library. 

The most appropriate assignment of responsibility for the various 
aspects of the campus network is less clear. One aspect of campus 
networks is the development and maintenance of the physical medium 
of communication and of the software that provides for the transmission 
of data and for connectivity, within the institution as well as to external 
networks. This aspect has been compared to building and maintaining 
a highway. Another aspect is the design and implementation of user- 
friendly interfaces and directories of capabilities and databases. A third 
aspect is the selection of electronic capabilities and databases that will 
be made available and the terms under which they will be made available 
to local constituents and to people not directly affiliated with the local 
institution. 

Libraries have already assumed a leadership role and in some cases 
assumed financial responsibility for providing access to databases whose 
contents resemble traditional library information sources. The present 
CD-ROM versions of what were previously printed sources seem 
obviously the province of the library. Networked databases, however, 
whether mounted locally or available from remote locations, raise more 
complex issues and expenses. 

As networks continue to be developed and the number of machine- 
readable databases grows, colleges and universities need structures for 



112 MAR TIN R UNKLE 



identifying options, determining priorities, and choosing among 
options for the allocation of resources, including making judgments 
about value and cost. The trade-offs required are too difficult and too 
politically sensitive to be managed in traditional ways. A structure is 
needed that provides collaboration among (a) faculty representatives 
of academic disciplines, (b) staff with expert knowledge of computer 
and communications capabilities and costs, and (c) librarians who 
understand the vast array of information that can be made available 
and the ways it might be used. 

It is becoming increasingly important for librarians to be facilitators 
of decision making, as well as decision makers. They have a major 
role in identifying issues that must be addressed and in gathering and 
organizing the information needed to make decisions. Among the 
information that must be brought to bear on the decisions is the cost 
of providing information in both traditional and electronic formats. 
Most libraries do not invest enough money in collecting and analyzing 
management information. Because librarians are always so far from 
providing the ideal library, they are reluctant to divert money from 
activities that will directly and immediately improve services to users. 
One application of information technology that we should somehow 
fit into our budgets is the capacity for better cost accounting and the 
provision of other management information about our operations. 

We must assume that income to colleges and universities cannot 
be expanded sufficiently to pay for everything we would like to do 
or feel obligated to do. Certainly, we need to continue to make the 
case and argue for funds. Certainly, institutions that are part of state 
systems should argue for funding for systemwide capabilities. And 
certainly, within institutions, librarians should try for cost sharing with 
other academic departments. But whatever the success of the efforts 
for funding, economies and trade-offs will have to be made. 

Regardless of who controls the decisions and the budgets for 
networking and access to electronic information, these new capabilities 
will continue to compete with traditional library collections and services. 
We must continue to sharpen our priorities, scrutinize our budgets, 
and consider possibilities for reallocating money. Following are some 
possibilities for economies in the categories of (a) charging for services, 
(b) performing traditional services more efficiently, (c) reducing or 
eliminating traditional services, (d) reducing collecting in traditional 
formats, and (e) cooperation and resource sharing. 

Charging for Services 

As access to certain kinds of electronic information and networking 
capabilities becomes more the accepted norm and is considered a 



CHANGING ECONOMICS 113 



requirement, not a mere convenience or special service, we will be unable 
to establish a pricing structure and impose cost-recovery fees to support 
base-level services. Some faculty and students are willing and able to 
pay for convenience or for highly individualized service from their own 
pockets or from grant funds. However, it is firmly embedded in academic 
culture that the institution will provide access on a more or less equal 
basis to the basic information people need to pursue their research and 
education. Charging for access to information would be like asking 
individual faculty members to rent the classrooms they teach in. This 
is capitalism run amok. Again, not in our lifetimes are we likely to 
risk discouraging students from doing research by making them pay 
as they go for access to the information they need. 

Performing Traditional Services More Efficiently 

Librarians have always strived to perform services more efficiently. 
There probably are not substantial additional savings to be realized, 
but without continual questioning of why we perform certain processes 
and paying attention to how we do them, efficiency will inevitably 
decline. Automation was first introduced as a way of performing library 
processing more efficiently. It did allow libraries to do things better 
but not necessarily at less cost. In fact, automation has raised expectations 
and opened new possibilities, so that as the cost of computing and 
storage capacity has decreased, applications have expanded to more than 
offset potential savings. As the online catalog gets increasingly bigger 
and more inclusive, and searching and other interactive capabilities 
get more and more sophisticated, increasing amounts of storage and 
computing capacity are used up, necessitating ever more complex 
software applications and staff resources to maintain them. 

Reducing or Eliminating Traditional Services 

In addition to trying to be efficient, libraries constantly explore 
possibilities for reducing or eliminating traditional services. Martin 
Cummings (1986) bemoans repeatedly the lack of cost analysis of library 
operations and services. Such analysis is difficult for much of what 
libraries do, but we need better information about costs to help us make 
choices, including choices regarding new information technology. As 
technology advances, we need to reexamine some of the old targets for 
budget cutting and see them in a new context. Perhaps the convenience 
lost by closing a departmental library could be more than offset by 
a new kind of convenience. 

There are limits, however, to how far we can go in measuring and 
quantifying the benefits of libraries in general and the particular services 



1 14 MARTIN R UNKLE 



they provide or the values that they represent. Academic libraries exist 
to support the goals and missions of their institutions. How can one 
establish a dollar value or do a cost-benefit analysis of much of the 
research and education that takes place in academic institutions? 

Reducing the Level of Collecting in Traditional Formats 

Can we consider offsetting the cost of electronic information by 
cutting back on acquisitions in traditional formats? In a sense, academic 
libraries have already reduced their level of collecting in traditional 
formats in that they are collecting an ever smaller portion of what is 
available to collect. Is there a realistic possibility of choosing to reduce 
the present level of acquisitions budgets by 25 percent or some other 
substantial amount? A reduction in acquisitions would also result in 
a reduction in the costs of processing and of space, though costs of 
providing access to other collections might increase. 

Libraries have been reluctant to give up the printed versions even 
of sources that they are acquiring in electronic form, such as 
bibliographies and indexes on CD-ROM. Giving up the printed versions, 
although not encouraged by present pricing structures, would produce 
savings, but libraries have been concerned about losing ownership and 
being at the mercy of producers. 

A particularly interesting example of the ownership issue is the 
extensive full-text literature in the field of law and on a broad range 
of other subjects that is available through LEXIS, NEXIS, and 
WESTLAW. The UC law librarian estimates that these databases contain 
the texts of over 97,000 of the volumes in the Law Library, which is 
18 percent of its entire collection. Of the 12,500 volumes added to the 
Law Library last year, approximately 30 percent, or 4,000 volumes, are 
in these databases. All UC Law School faculty and students now have 
access to these databases from homes and offices, as well as from terminals 
in the Law Library, with no contractual limit on the amount of text 
they can print. All of this access is made available at unrealistically 
low rates because the vendors want law students to become dependent 
on these resources so that, when they go into practice, they will continue 
to use them but pay full freight. It will be interesting to see if use 
of the print collections in the UC Law Library declines sharply in 
the next year or two; it probably will. 

We have not yet been able to bring ourselves to eliminate the printed 
versions of what is covered in these databases; we are concerned about 
becoming dependent on the electronic versions and vulnerable to greatly 
increased costs in the future. What happens if the vendors decide that 
these databases have become so firmly established and indispensable 
that they no longer need to offer such attractive rates to libraries, and 



CHANGING ECONOMICS 115 



we are suddenly faced with paying hundreds of thousands of dollars 
to continue the access we have had? Theoretically, we could revert to 
using only the printed forms of the publications, but realistically, can 
we? Once accustomed to the convenience and superior access of the 
electronic format, will faculty and students tolerate a return to access 
only to the printed form? Probably not particularly not lawyers! 

There is a clear danger that, if for-profit producers of electronic 
information acquire a monopoly or near monopoly on information in 
electronic form, we could face even worse profiteering than we now 
face with a few publishers of science journals. Although some people 
have predicted that further development and expansion of the 
publication of electronic journals will help us to address the high cost 
of journals, the economics are not so clear. Perhaps the effect of electronic 
journals will be like that of library automation: Enhance access 
immeasurably but not save money. 

Resource Sharing 

Libraries have for many centuries looked to cooperation and 
resource sharing as a way of fulfilling their missions. There were union 
catalogs of manuscripts long before the invention of printing 
(Richardson, 1936, p. v), and it is likely that groups of monasteries 
coordinated their copying of manuscripts. 

Academic administrators see cooperation and resource sharing as 
a way of saving money. Librarians, on the other hand, see it as a way 
of expanding the information sources that can be made available to 
their constituencies, but not necessarily as a way of saving money. By 
cooperating, librarians can provide information and services that they 
could not otherwise provide. 

The primary manifestation of resource sharing is the sharing of 
access to collections on-site or by way of interlibrary lending. Access 
to collections held elsewhere is becoming increasingly important. 
Sharing of collections does not necessarily involve coordination of 
acquisitions among libraries. It can be merely the sharing of whatever 
materials libraries happen to have collected in trying to satisfy local 
needs. Although there has been a fair amount of informal coordination 
of acquisitions among libraries, we have been less successful with larger, 
more structured, and more formal programs. (An important exception 
is the Center for Research Libraries.) 

We should try to do a better job of coordinating acquisitions among 
groups of libraries to insure that, collectively, we provide the broadest 
possible range of collection resources. Networking and information 
technology are providing mechanisms for improved coordination, and 
access through networks to the order files of other libraries is already 



1 16 MARTIN R UNKLE 



affecting acquisitions decisions. Implementation of serials control 
systems in more libraries will provide the kind of specific and current 
information that is needed for better coordination of serials acquisitions. 
We should continue to reexamine the possibilities for coordination as 
networking and information technology improve. 

At the same time, we should continue to improve even more the 
timeliness and reliability of interlibrary lending. To improve it to the 
level it should be, we must begin to think of it more as a business 
proposition and not as a moral issue or a test of altruism. The costs 
of borrowing or lending an item or providing photocopies through 
interlibrary loan are not trivial. Aside from fees that lending libraries 
might charge, the average cost of an interlibrary loan transaction is 
at least $8 on each end of the transaction, and some cost studies indicate 
it is $15 or $20. At $8, which is probably low, the cost of 10,000 interlibrary 
loan transactions is $160,000. It is puzzling that most libraries bury 
these costs in various parts of their budgets. 

First, libraries should understand the costs of borrowing for their 
patrons and budget for it as a service. Second, lenders should be 
compensated for their costs. Most libraries will expedite lending 
transactions only if they are not losing money for their efforts and 
detracting from their local priorities. These points bear emphasizing 
because it is only by being more businesslike about interlibrary lending 
that we can maintain and improve the sharing of collections and provide 
the basis for more refined coordination of collection development. Access 
in place of ownership does not mean access without cost. It is possible 
that all the money now spent on interlibrary lending and borrowing 
could pay for a superior document delivery service on a very different 
model. We will not know this until we face up to the true costs of 
the present system. 

There is also room for cooperation and sharing in the provision 
of electronic information, but, as with print collections, we must not 
assume, and base our planning on the assumption, that we can share 
freely without regard to cost. Producers of electronic information have 
a legitimate concern about recovering the costs of producing it, whether 
they are in the for-profit or not-for-profit sector. As with interlibrary 
lending, if external use of locally supported databases and other electronic 
information capabilities interferes with local use, owners of the resources 
will not be forthcoming in allowing access unless they are compensated. 



CONCLUSION 

This paper has not been able to address the economics of providing 
access to networking capabilities and electronic information as fully and 



CHANGING ECONOMICS 117 



specifically as the author would have liked. It has merely alluded to 
what everyone knows: it will cost more money than we can see our 
way clear to provide. The day when a scholar can sit at a workstation 
and have the entire world of information, or even a substantial portion 
of it, available at the click of a mouse or a voice command is a long 
way off. On our way to this day, we have some interesting cultural, 
technical, and economic issues to wrestle with. We will be required, 
as J. Warren Haas put it, "to make fundamental changes in the very 
definition of what a library is and to recast operations and services in 
a dramatically different mold" (Cummings, 1986, p. 7). Those of us in 
the business of recasting that mold are privileged to have such challenging 
and interesting jobs, but we have difficult choices ahead of us. 



REFERENCES 

Cummings, M. M. (1986). The economics of research libraries. Washington, DC: Council 

on Library Resources. 
Daval, N., & Lichtenstein, A. (Comps.). (1985). ARL statistics, 1983-84. Washington, DC: 

Association of Research Libraries. 
Richardson, E. C. (1936). Introduction. In A. Berthold (Comp.), Union catalogues: A 

selective bibliography (pp. v-xii). Philadelphia: Union Library Catalogue of the 

Philadelphia Metropolitan Area. 
Stubbs, K. (1991). Introduction. In S. M. Pritchard and E. Finer (Comps.), ARL statistics, 

1989-90. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries. 



KENNETH R. R. GROS LOUIS 

Vice President and Chancellor 

Indiana University 
Bloomington, Indiana 



The Real Costs and Financial Challenges 
of Library Networking: Part 1* 



ABSTRACT 

Library networking has created a number of administrative and policy 
issues. Questions of governance, budgeting, cooperation, and reporting 
lines must be addressed. In some cases, these issues must be addressed 
by librarians; in others, by campus administrators. In any event, the 
importance of the research library must be recognized, and support 
for the library's priorities must be marshalled. 



INTRODUCTION 

This conference touches on themes of major importance to each 
of us involved in higher education governance, budgeting, 
cooperation, reporting lines. These issues, although difficult in 
themselves, become even more difficult when most schools face fiscal 
problems and when there is pressure to take advantage of recent 
technological advances. Administrative and policy concerns raised at 
this conference will be the subject of discussions at our home campuses 
for months, probably years, to come. 



*This paper summarizes comments made by the author as part of a panel discussion 
titled "The Real Costs and Financial Challenges of Library Networking." Panel 
participants included Kenneth Gros Louis, Paul Hunt, Thomas Shaughnessy, and 
William Studer. 



118 



COSTS OF LIBRARY NETWORKING PART 1 119 



As the chief executive of the Bloomington campus of Indiana 
University (IU) and as chair for the past four years of the Committee 
on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), I have been involved with these 
concerns and how they will increasingly influence the future of research 
libraries. I am not a technological expert; instead my role at this 
conference is to look at some of those administrative and policy matters 
that inevitably come to mind when we examine cooperative programs 
of any kind. 



GOVERNANCE 

All universities, of course, have a long and good tradition of collegia! 
decision making of bottom-up planning. But I feel that the issues 
linked to the kinds of cooperation discussed at this conference are so 
diverse, so new, require such a variety of levels of expertise, and carry 
such enormous financial implications that some new paradigm will 
be necessary if we are to plan imaginatively and successfully for large- 
scale national arrangements that protect the resources we have been 
asked to preserve and that our faculty expects us to make available. 
In all this, it is likely that a tension will arise between those models 
of governance most of us are long accustomed to not that any of them 
is poor or inefficient and the growing fear that they may not be equal 
to the task ahead. 

Certain questions are obvious and indeed have already been touched 
on. Some of them librarians will be answering; others chief academic 
officers will be answering. It may be useful to make the distinction 
about who will be doing what. Consider some of the questions: 

1. What technologies and communication systems will be necessary in 
the future? 

2. What features are needed to make library automation networks 
compatible? 

3. How useful are retrieval tools to the average user, and who will be 
the average user? 

4. Who will control access to stored information? 

5. Who will determine standards, and how will they be arrived at? 

6. Does increased participation in networks mean significant changes 
in service priorities? 

7. What are the implications for each of you? 

The list, of course, goes on. My own experience with the Center 
for Research Libraries and more recently as a member of the Commission 
on Preservation and Access has underlined for me that much of the 
current national organization structure of libraries, however successful, 



120 KENNETH R. R. GROS LOUIS 



still remains enormously complicated, complex, intricate, hierarchical, 
and mysterious. At times, membership and participation seem to depend 
on relatively few people at each institution, and the ability to effect 
national change seems increasingly limited. All of the many acronyms 
that define who you are and what you do mean a lot, I realize, but 
the acronym is not always easy to get, and the multiple acronyms 
sometimes confound and confuse rather than clarify. 

From my perspective, it is unlikely that the current models will 
be appropriate for any successful planning that will lead to national 
networked systems. I cannot imagine what organization will make 
budgetary and policy decisions for multiple institutions. I cannot 
imagine any of the existing administrative structures responsibly taking 
on these issues. I cannot imagine large research libraries preserving 
their collections to provide access to smaller libraries, nor can I envision 
smaller libraries giving up a good deal of their autonomy to become 
in a real sense branches of larger libraries. 

These are the problems that must be addressed by librarians. The 
kinds of issues that provosts and chief academic officers must address 
involve the competition between the library of the future and other 
priorities of our institutions. Even now, as you all well know, the 
establishment of priorities is difficult, often puzzling. And not only 
will we face competing internal objectives, we must also be aware of 
external forces state and federal agencies, local political interests, 
regional concerns, alumni, and the citizenry at large. I am not sure 
that we will be able to marshal the political forces necessary to gain 
the support needed. Think about other issues affecting us and requiring 
the same marshalling of the same forces: How often can they be called 
upon? 



BUDGETING 

Brett Sutton, Charles Davis, Jim Neal, and others have described 
to me the issues as they perceive them. In their letters and conversations, 
I have been struck by the similarity, at times the repetition, of certain 
words, certain phrases networks, open and public access, distributed 
library, integration, community, communication, interconnections, 
collaboration all suggestive of cooperation in ways that we have never 
seen before in American higher education. 

I think of the most recent meeting of the CIC on March 18, 1990, 
in which the chief academic officers agreed that the fiscal crises now 
facing most of us are unlikely to be alleviated in the years ahead. We 
believe that public higher education will not fare well in debates at 
the state and national levels, that sentiment for raising taxes will not 



COSTS OF LIBRARY NETWORKING PART 1 121 



grow, that other demands on state and federal funds will increase, and 
that concerns about what we do with our resources will increasingly 
be central to a growingly suspicious public. How can we do more with 
the same dollars, or perhaps with fewer? 



COOPERATION 

That is the context, it seems to me, in which we must consider 
future scenarios, and in which we must realize that what we do may 
need to go far beyond what we have done or even imagined doing. 
The issue may not be the saving of particular traditions or even particular 
institutions; rather it may be a matter of preserving national resources. 
The CIC, for example, has been considering academic programs at each 
of our campuses. How many exotic programs should be offered in the 
Midwest? Is it possible for us to work cooperatively so that only two 
or three institutions offer certain programs? If we do not work 
cooperatively, is not there a danger that in the next decade or two it 
will turn out that no one in the Midwest has a program in some small 
enrollment area or, perhaps as bad, that half of the institutions in the 
region have such a program? It seems to us that only by pooling resources, 
not our resources but those of the nation, can we fulfill what the public, 
sometimes without knowing it, really expects of us. 

As I cannot imagine universities doing business as usual in the 
next several decades, so too I cannot imagine libraries doing business 
as usual. I understand how enormously complex it will be for regional 
libraries to cooperate in collection development, resource sharing, 
perhaps even personnel sharing. I do not know how to do it, I am 
not sure it can be done, but I do believe that responses of academic 
officers, faculty budgetary advisory committees, and university 
presidents will be much more favorable if the level of cooperation among 
libraries is greater than it has been in the past. The real challenge 
is how to enhance collections with an existing or even shrinking budget 
by sharing collection development policies as well as databases and 
other means of accessing material. Ownership, like the ownership of 
some exotic degree program, must be abandoned in favor of access. 

There are other concerns. I am not confident that integrated 
networks and greater cooperation will necessarily lead to better services 
for students and scholars. I am not even confident that such collaboration 
will lead to financial savings. The costs involved go well beyond the 
obvious investments in hardware and software and buildings, beyond 
the cost of staff recruitment and training. 

Perhaps the issue of governance is the largest one we face. If each 
of us does participate in elaborate networks with other libraries, who 



122 KENNETH R. R. GROS LOUIS 



will bear the initial costs? The major research libraries cannot by 
themselves carry the burden for everyone else. I suspect that the federal 
government might be willing to bear a good portion of the burden 
if members of Congress could be persuaded, as they have been on the 
issue of brittle books, that a truly national effort was underway to 
enhance collections for students and scholars in a coherent, coordinated 
plan that identified specific sites for certain collections, the mode of 
access to those collections for others not at that site, and in ways that 
radically altered the nature of libraries and the role of librarians. 



REPORTING LINES 

If the previous issue is complex, equally so is the issue of control 
of information on a single campus. Who will be in charge? Librarians? 
Those in administrative or academic computing? Those in telecom- 
munications? Even if that decision is made locally, what happens at 
regional, indeed national, levels? If there are individual czars and czarinas 
on campuses, can or should the library community identify such 
individuals for regions as well? 



CONCLUSION 

I always come back to the questions surrounding the process of 
resource allocation. At Indiana, Jim Neal, our dean of libraries, 
participates as a member of my campus cabinet, attends staff and dean's 
meetings, and is involved in the setting of campus priorities. We now 
face a reduction from the state for the first time in fifty years, and 
as we consider our basic priorities, I am pleased to say that library 
support has risen to the top of the list. That speaks well for Jim, for 
the faculty confidence in him and his staff, but also for the value that 
faculty and staff place on the research library. We need to tap that 
support, understand it, explain to it what it is we believe needs to be 
done, marshal and organize it, and bring it to the attention of our 
state legislators and members of Congress. 



THOMAS W. SHAUGHNESSY 

University Librarian 
University of Minnesota 
Minneapolis, Minnesota 



The Real Costs and Financial Challenges 
of Library Networking: Part 2* 



ABSTRACT 

The development of the virtual electronic library and the resulting shift 
in emphasis from ownership to access raise questions about the 
responsibility for local collection development. However, access depends 
on ownership; a network does not create new resources, it facilitates 
the sharing of existing resources. This sharing has resulted in 
burdensome levels of interlibrary loan activity. In addition to the 
financial costs that result from this activity, convenience costs to local 
users at the lending library and increased preservation costs must be 
considered. Finally, research libraries will not only be measured by 
ownership statistics but by access criteria as well, and they will also 
have to deal with the politics of virtual libraries and networking. 



THE VIRTUAL (OR LOGICAL) LIBRARY AND NETWORKING 

One of the most dangerous ideas to confront research librarianship 
in recent years is the notion of the virtual electronic library. This is 
the library represented in part by the OCLC and Research Libraries 



This paper summarizes comments made by the author as part of a panel discussion 
titled "The Real Costs and Financial Challenges of Library Networking." Panel 
participants included Kenneth Gros Louis, Paul Hunt, Thomas Shaughnessy, and 
William Studer. 



123 



124 THOMAS W. SHAUGHNESSY 



Information Network (RLIN), plus the online public access catalogs 
(OPACs) of individual libraries, plus a vast array of commercial 
databases. So what is so dangerous about this idea? The danger is that 
it relieves libraries, in the minds of campus decision makers, of the 
responsibility to build local collections, to request more space for old- 
fashioned, paper-based collections, and to engage in all of the labor- 
intensive inventory control activities that are required by print 
collections. The so-called library without walls, however, continues to 
be very much a series of physical places housed within some very real 
walls. For it is these institutions that supply a great deal of the 
information requested via the networks. 

The recent shift in emphasis from ownership to access thinking 
that seems to have pervaded even our own field without much 
challenge leads one to ask why any library should buy any print 
material at all. In fact, why even have a library? Would not an office 
equipped with fax machines, text-digitizing equipment, scholarly 
workstations, and other electronic telecommunication devices suffice? 
But what would such a center be providing access to? The answer rests 
heavily upon collections and other resources identified, selected, 
purchased, cataloged, processed, shelved, and made available for use 
by some library, somewhere, which invested in the ownership of scholarly 
material. In the last analysis, access depends on ownership. 

Some have tried to compare research libraries to supercomputing 
centers. A relatively small number of supercomputers are sufficient to 
meet the needs of most academic researchers. Most of the university- 
based supercomputers have excess capacity, and consequently time on 
these machines is being sold to the private sector. But there are no 
"superlibraries." Most research libraries are able to acquire less than 
one-tenth of the world's publications each year (estimated by UNESCO 
to be some 850,000 titles). 

It is also important to remember a statement that Dick DeGennaro 
made about networks: by itself, a network creates no new resources; 
it merely facilitates the sharing of existing resources. To build on 
DeGennaro's insight, one can compare the relationship between 
networks and libraries to the relationship between the musicians in 
an orchestra and their conductor: Networks, like batons, make no sound. 
The sounds that bring us to the concert hall and elevate our spirits 
are those made by the individual instrumentalists and virtuosos. We 
need to value and reinvest in our virtuoso library collections and move 
away from a situation in which we seem to know the cost or price 
of everything and the value of nothing. 



USE OF NETWORKS RESOURCE SHARING 

The second topic briefly addressed here is one of the specific uses 
made of networks: resource sharing. In the past three years, interlibrary 



COSTS OF LIBRARY NETWORKING PART 2 125 



loan lending among the ten largest public academic research libraries 
increased by 16 percent, while borrowing increased by 25 percent. 
Reasons for less interlibrary loan activity among the largest are (a) 
overload, (b) internal tactics by staff to reduce workload, (c) fees, and 
(d) saying "no." Among all (large and small) Association of Research 
Libraries (ARL) university libraries, lending activity increased by 25.6 
percent (1987-90), while borrowing increased by 30.5 percent. These one 
hundred or so university libraries loaned or borrowed more than 4.2 
million items in 1989-90. If this rate of increase persists, by 1995-96, 
interlibrary transactions will increase to 6.3 million items. According 
to Rowland Brown, OCLC's former CEO, U.S. ARL libraries provide 
approximately 22 percent of the loans on OCLC but account for only 
2.5 percent of the membership. 

Tom Waldhart (1985), in his review article on interlibrary loan, 
postulates that if the volume of interlibrary loan activity were to 
approach just 5 percent of every library's total circulation, "it is highly 
unlikely... that the nation's libraries, or its interlibrary loan system, could 
effectively deal with numbers of this magnitude without a major 
breakdown in operation" (p. 217). 

But the fact is that many of our libraries are already finding it 
impossible to keep up with existing levels of interlibrary loan traffic. 
As George Keller (1983) noted in his book, Academic Strategy, where 
pressures are in charge, the present gets attention, not the future; fighting 
brush fires and improvisation take precedence, not planning; defense 
is the game, not offense (p. 75). 

Many of us believe that there are two driving forces behind the 
rising demand for resource sharing: the increased bibliographic access 
provided by OPACs and CD-ROMs and the use of resource sharing 
networks to borrow not just esoteric or seldom-used material but basic, 
curriculum-related undergraduate books and journals. We know this 
is happening in Minnesota, and it is probably occurring in other states 
as well. Because all of Minnesota's public colleges have converted their 
bibliographic records, it is possible to determine the age of library 
collections based on date of publication. Twenty-seven percent of the 
titles owned by these libraries were published before 1960; 26 percent 
were published in the 1960s; 27 percent in the 1970s; and 19 percent 
in the 1980s. One of these state university libraries currently has a listing 
of 450 journals from which it has requested the maximum number of 
photocopies allowable under the copyright law. A large and growing 
proportion of the 600 items that the University of Minnesota libraries 
lend each day is not research material. Not long ago, at a meeting similar 
to this one, Sheila Dowd, who was then head of collection development 
at Berkeley, said that the jury is still out on how far we can go in 
sharing materials that are central to our respective universities' missions. 



126 THOMAS W. SHAUGHNESSY 



COSTS OF NETWORKING/RESOURCE SHARING 

Strange as it may sound, it is very difficult to get a handle on 
the costs of resource sharing. The Research Libraries Group (RLG) 
tried to conduct a study of these costs in five libraries in 1988 and came 
up with these figures: borrowing costs ranged from $13 to $20 per item; 
lending costs ranged from $5 to $15. If we were to assume that the 
average cost of an interlibrary loan transaction in 1990 was $15, then 
the ARL university libraries spent $63.6 million on this activity in 1989- 
90. This is almost three times the amount these libraries spent on binding 
and is 87 percent of the amount they spent for part-time student 
assistants. In just five or six years, if present trends continue, ARL 
university libraries could be spending 100 million dollars on interlibrary 
lending and borrowing. 

There are obviously other costs in addition to financial ones. These 
include convenience costs to local users (to what extent is access like 
justice: is access delayed or denied?) and preservation costs (to what 
extent is the life span of library collections particularly bound 
journals being shortened due to repeated photocopying?). To the best 
of the author's knowledge, these costs have never been factored into 
the real costs (mushy as they are) of resource sharing. 



MEASUREMENTS, STANDARDS, AND POLITICS 

A few words about each of these. Measurement: We all bemoan 
the fact that research libraries continue to be measured according to 
ownership statistics that bigger is necessarily better and that quantity 
is synonymous with quality. Library volume counts; volumes added 
and serials subscribed to are simply inputs to the library organization. 
We need these measures, but we also need to measure "units of access." 
But as the ARL Committee on Statistics learned, trying to measure 
access is like trying to climb a very slippery slope. And while we may 
criticize the ARL statistics, they remain the best in the library world 
and continue to be relied upon by library administrators and other 
campus decision makers. Our challenge is to come up with valid access 
measures that focus on user outcomes, measures that balance our 
traditional measures of library inputs or throughputs. 

With regard to standards, many librarians are far more interested 
in standards such as Z39.50 than they are in ACRL standards that state 
the responsibility of all academic libraries to develop collections that 
support the curriculum. There is no substitute for basic, up-to-date 
collections available on site. We would not think of borrowing basic 



COSTS OF LIBRARY NETWORKING PART 2 127 



laboratory equipment such as microscopes and Bunsen burners from 
another institution. Certain library collections are just as basic. 

Finally, the politics of virtual libraries and networking must be 
considered. In many ways, the problems faced by libraries are similar 
to those of the health industry. In both areas, costs are escalating beyond 
our ability to keep pace, and questions of institutional responsibility 
are being raised along with questions of access, the quality of services 
rendered, and the need for cost containment. One writer has suggested 
that research libraries are imprisoned by the book, and were they able 
to eliminate entirely the need to acquire and manage large print 
collections, up to 80 percent of the cost of operating these libraries 
might be saved or redirected. But the challenge that we face is managing 
our libraries over a fairly extended transition period. We are caught 
between two very different worlds. Many library administrators are 
trying to move towards a library without walls as they deal with resources 
that are very much placebound. But in the last analysis, most of us 
would acknowledge that Jim Penrod was right when he said that in 
the world in which we now live, capital and/or human resources or 
book collections can no longer guarantee success. Rather, he said, service 
quality, speed of response, and innovation are now the determinants 
of success in information organizations. 

We need, therefore, to appreciate the fact that a great deal of the 
world's information continues to exist in print and paper. Consequently, 
for quite a few more years we will continue to need real libraries, not 
virtual ones. 



REFERENCES 

Keller, G. (1983). Academic strategy: The management revolution in American higher 

education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 
Waldhart, T. J. (1985). I. Performance of interlibrary loan in the U.S.: A review of research. 

Library and Information Science Research, 7(3), 209-229. 



WILLIAM J. STUDER 

Director, Ohio State University Libraries 
Columbus, Ohio 



The Real Costs and Financial Challenges 
of Library Networking: Part 3* 



ABSTRACT 

The development of electronic networks is seen by some as a way to 
lower the high costs associated with collecting, maintaining, and storing 
traditional print-based library material. In reality, at least for the near 
future, libraries will be faced with double costs associated with the 
storage of dual formats. Additional costs will also result from the need 
to inform and train potential users. And as users are exposed to a wider 
variety of relevant materials held at other libraries, interlibrary loan 
activity will increase with resulting increased costs associated with staff 
time, computer equipment and support, and network use. Finally, as 
a result of increased networking, a structure to coordinate resources 
and access will have to be developed. 



ELECTRONIC NETWORK RESOURCES 

The vast array of resources now made available through information 
and network technologies is rapidly outpacing our ability to facilitate 
users' optimum use of them. There are now some 200 online public 
access catalogs (OPACs) available on the Internet, a handful of bona 



*This paper summarizes comments made by the author as part of a panel discussion 
titled "The Real Costs and Financial Challenges of Library Networking." Panel 
participants included Kenneth Gros Louis, Paul Hunt, Thomas Shaughnessy, and 
William Studer. 



128 



COSTS OF LIBRARY NETWORKING PART 3 129 



fide electronic journals, a growing amount of full-text materials, 
hundreds of topical bulletin boards and listser vers, and literally countless 
other resources. How much awareness and use expertise do our academic 
communities have relative to these resources and accompanying access 
technology? 

Not very much, it would seem. So, the challenge is to establish 
and maintain instructional programs (a collaborative effort between 
computing centers and libraries) to bring resource awareness to the user 
community and to inform specifically in access technology and 
methodology. For the research library, this will require a major and 
costly extension of involvement in the training function. During the 
1990s, libraries simply must become a major source of education and 
training for use of electronic information networks. 

At the same time, the production of print-based information will 
slacken only slightly, and the obligation to maintain and serve the 
millions of print volumes now populating our libraries will remain. 
So, once again, we are faced with add-on costs for additional functions, 
i.e., we will not be able to recover significant budget resources from 
the cessation or lessening of more traditional library services in order 
to reallocate to this greatly increased training role. 

In terms of acquisition of information resources, the evolutionary 
development of the National Research and Education Network (NREN) 
and associated technologies will certainly be conducive to greatly 
increased electronic publishing, thereby giving libraries another cost 
center with which to cope, both in terms of acquisition or use costs 
and in terms of cataloging (and possibly storage) costs. This electronic 
format of information will not in any dramatic way substitute for print 
in the near future all the associated costs for which will remain. There 
are only added costs when electronic-based information essentially 
supplements rather than supplants print-based information. 

However, as we look to an eventual significant transition from print 
to electronic publishing, there is a potential cost-savings implication 
for libraries relative to storage and building expansion assuming, of 
course, some form of reasonable central storage of electronic information 
of guaranteed archival quality. Most of a library's inexorable need for 
physical growth is related to the storage of bulky print volumes. 

Electronic full-text publications, together with original print 
formats converted to electronic versions, represent a relatively minuscule 
portion of a library's overall information resources at the moment, but 
growth will likely be considerable and on an accelerating curve over 
the next ten years. Yet no one seems to be dealing realistically with 
the issue of archiving this electronic data, which will certainly incur 
substantial costs as volume and complexity grow. 



130 WILLIAM J. STUDER 



INTERLIBRARY LOAN COSTS 

Access to electronic information sources, both those locally available 
and those obtained over regional and national networks (including 
OPACs), has greatly increased many users' exposure to a wider variety 
of relevant materials, only a portion of which any given library will 
hold. Hence, costly interlibrary loan (ILL) traffic has increased almost 
exponentially. And we are only on the front edge of this demand, given 
the relatively few who are currently plugged into networked information 
sources. At Ohio State University (OSU), for instance, the number of 
requests to borrow materials from other libraries has risen 565 percent 
in five years. This rapid growth parallels a marked decline in the number 
of materials acquired locally. With reference to users' discovery of more 
and more relevant material via network access, it will also become more 
compelling to devise systems for direct request and receipt of the 
materials versus the cumbersome mediated ILL processes currently in 
place. 

A significant network cost advantage in resource sharing derives 
from the capability to transmit fax over the Internet free of out-of- 
pocket telecommunications charges. A majority of ILL traffic consists 
of journal articles which can be transmitted via fax very cost-effectively 
with concomitant great improvement in timeliness of delivery. 

As users take more and more advantage of access to network-based 
information resources, there will surely be more demand at local levels 
from "external" users who need assistance in using given databases 
perhaps OPACs most of all. This will likely cause some tension in 
maintaining a balance of how much time and resource one devotes 
to helping external users while not diminishing service to the local 
constituency. 



NETWORK CONNECTIVITY COSTS 

Networking is unquestionably a force for good, but it also seems 
to embody the momentum of a revolutionary transformation. Speaking 
strictly of internal library settings, all staff want and need network 
connectivity for user benefit, to be sure, but also very much for their 
own use of electronic mail, bulletin boards, and other resources. OSU 
Libraries finds itself in a few short years with 156 personal computer 
workstations in addition to terminals connected to our OPAC. Beyond 
the obvious purchase cost, this equipment requires installation, 
telecommunications/network connections, maintenance, repair, 
software upgrades, troubleshooting of all kinds, and eventual 
replacement. All of this means significantly increased add-on costs for 



COSTS OF LIBRARY NETWORKING PART 3 131 



which we have not been funded, but which somehow must be 
accommodated. Also, when full text with graphics comes more to the 
fore, we will need more expensive hardware to store and display images. 

On a more mundane note, the cost of computer printer paper is 
a major one. How many people read the bulk of electronic information 
online? Most people print out reams, and so do users of public terminals 
with printers available free of charge. Ironically, the vast quantity of 
printer paper being consumed in the cause of electronic information 
dissemination represents a large and almost entirely add-on cost. 

The labyrinth of networks forming the Internet are currently usable 
free of charge to end-users, but as the NREN evolves and government 
subsidies decline, will users (and libraries) be expected to pay some 
of the costs? Such a new and perhaps considerable cost obligation could 
pose a real barrier to use. Related is the issue of inevitable access 
restrictions to networks and/or to given databases, which will necessitate 
the creation of complex systems for authentication and even billing. 



CONCLUSION 

The decentralized and distributed virtual library is an exciting 
concept, certainly made more realizable through the connectivity 
networking provides. But it is also a worrisome construct made even 
more so when coupled with glib notions of immediate impacts of 
electronic publishing. Without some degree of collection development 
planning and coordination (for which the nation as a whole is likely 
too large a planning arena), the efficacy of the virtual library can readily 
break down because fewer and fewer libraries may acquire what more 
and more users need. This approach to resource sharing is very tempting 
and captivating to some university administrators who perceive library 
cost savings while at the same time wondrously making even more 
resources available to users. This author, for one, is very intrigued and 
interested but also very concerned with how to superimpose structure 
on such a free-form system. Relative to electronic publishing, there is 
a tendency on the part of some unschooled administrators to believe 
that the electronic information era has arrived and signals significant 
cost savings for libraries when, in fact, living with the double costs 
of dual formats will be the order of the day for some time to come. 



CARL R. GRANT 

Vice President of Marketing 

Data Research Associates 

St. Louis, Missouri 



DRANET: An Information Network* 



ABSTRACT 

Data Research, a library automation firm, is also a database provider 
and the implementors and administrators of a nationwide library 
network called DRANET. Mounted on this network are the Library 
of Congress machine-readable cataloging (LCMARC) database (some 
4 million records), Information Access Co. (IAC) indexes, and other 
library bibliographic files. LCMARC authority files and full text for 
selected serials will be added soon. 



INTRODUCTION 

DRANET was originally a bibliographic network, but it is rapidly 
changing in nature and is becoming, instead, an information network. 
This network links every type of library from grade schools to 
community colleges to four-year colleges and research libraries. 
Furthermore, DRANET is a node on Internet. Because of this, late last 
year we took a step that generated some considerable interest among 
libraries. 

In September 1990, we provided free access to the Library of Congress 
machine-readable cataloging (LCMARC) database to all institutions, 
worldwide, on the Internet. That step caused many to stop and take 



'This paper summarizes comments made by the author as part of a panel discussion 
titled "The Role of Traditional Library Networks." 



132 



TRADITIONAL LIBRARY NETWORKS 133 



notice. My phone rang frequently, followed by the question, "Why are 
you doing that why aren't you charging for this service?" My answer 
was because it was an experiment an experiment designed to see what 
kind of demand there was and what else was needed to support the 
database. 

Although access was limited, we have seen anywhere from a high 
of 1,000 searches a month to a low of 700. Access has been from the 
United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany, France, Norway, and 
Sweden although my personal favorite was when the Library of 
Congress logged in to look at their own database! Wondering if the 
international viewing of full MARC records was piquing their interest, 
we were inclined to contact our lawyers and begin preparing our defense. 
Alas, such action has not been necessary. 



NETWORKS' EFFECT ON TRADITIONAL 
BIBLIOGRAPHIC SERVICES 

This experiment has certainly provided us with some interesting 
observations about how networks will affect the so-called "traditional 
bibliographic services." Specifically, we see the following needs 
emerging: 

1. Traditional search capabilities will not be adequate. The user will 
want and demand a comprehensive range of search keys as well as 
expanded and consistent indexing. Although these may seem obvious 
and even self-evident, we must remember that the users accessing these 
databases will come far beyond the reach of our logic, training, or 
documentation. The search capability must pay attention to this fact. 

2. Specialization of databases will become a natural outgrowth of 
networking. This specialization will not be related just to database 
content but also to the packaging of the information. Integrating 
the information with graphics, images, and sound will be a major 
means of differentiation. Database providers (library or vendors) 
should also specialize in the areas of database expertise and 
management to provide a further level of specialization. This will 
help eliminate the duplication of resources that exists on the 
networks duplication that results in waste and confusion. 
Furthermore, this kind of specialization would be a natural outgrowth 
of cooperative collection development. 

3. Until such specialization occurs undoubtedly something that will 
take a very long time we must begin to develop as part of our search 
capabilities semi-intelligent software that will interrogate the 
network without constant user interaction. It is absurd for us to expect 
end-users to navigate the network and to learn the different search 



134 CARL R. GRANT 



commands and database content. If we do that, users will quickly 
tire of the mechanisms currently in place and will underutilize the 
network resource. 

4. Implementation and support of standards will help address this 
problem. Services that do not support Z39.50 and interfaces that do 
not support Z39.58 will face a slow and painful death. Rather than 
spending time developing terminal emulation packages, we should 
devote those resources to the implementation of standards so that 
the communication is at the process level where it belongs. Then 
it will not matter what terminal is used or what interface. 
Furthermore, one must become involved in the standards process. 
Those who are not members of National Information Standards 
Organization (NISO) should be. Standards are the key to networking. 

5. Cooperation between utilities is also becoming important. The ability 
of users to move easily between databases dictates not only the 
standards compliance just mentioned, but also the entire range of 
mechanisms that supports easy, transparent, and effective movement. 

6. Interlibrary loan (ILL) processes should be revised. The opening 
of these databases across networks dictates that ILL, the process that 
has come to be known largely as a backroom behemoth, is not 
adequate. ILL now moves to the forefront and becomes a user option 
that must be easily invoked and readily served. 

7. Closely coupled to ILL is the need to support delivery processes 
such as FAX, full-text delivery, and photocopying, particularly with 
regard to journal articles. Access to the databases on the network 
only proves that we can help the user quickly identify the work they 
need but if we then make the user wait for days or weeks for delivery, 
we have failed. We must begin moving quickly to ensure that once 
the work is identified via the network, we use that same network 
to ensure prompt delivery. 

8. We must also deal with all these costs and the need for increased 
demands on our computing resources. For a business such as Data 
Research Associates, this is, of course, easy. We charge for the services 
provided. Many will seek to do this by restriction of access, using 
policies that are in their own way the very equivalent of charging. 
Many of you have said, "We can't afford to do this," but isn't that 
the same as denying access? In that context, access with charge 
structures should be examined. These structures should compensate 
the library adequately for also providing access to those who are 
less technically and financially capable. But the fact remains that 
one must learn how to charge for services. 

It is not acceptable to simply take a budget cut one must look 
for ways to recover that lost revenue, for example, by offering library 



TRADITIONAL LIBRARY NETWORKS 135 



training as a mandatory course with credit-hour charges being credited 
to the library like any other department. If we can charge laboratory 
fees to make sure we have microscopes, why can't we charge library 
fees to make sure we have books? If we can charge for photocopies, 
why can't we charge for computer printouts? Understanding that 
these things always cost money is it just a matter of do we do indirect 
billing or direct billing? If we continue to rely on indirect billing, 
we leave ourselves open to budget cuts because it is much harder 
to link indirect costs directly to service provided. A direct charge 
is in one's best long-term interests. What we really need now is 
entrepreneurial librarians. 

9. We also wonder if we are placing too much hope on the National 
Research and Education Network (NREN) and if we are overlooking 
an obvious network that is already in place OCLC. Should we not 
consider having OCLC enhance the network services and connect 
to NREN as a subnet? 



CONCLUSION 

Answers to these needs are not going to come easily. Although 
the needs may be rather easily described, the solutions require steps 
that do not come naturally to libraries. The desire to own materials, 
to limit access to one's immediate constituency, not to charge for services, 
and not to cooperate all come as a longstanding tradition in this field. 
Yet networking isn't paying attention to those traditions; it is forcing 
us to cooperate or be bypassed. 

As providers of an information network, Data Research is paying 
attention to these needs. Enhanced search capabilities are being 
implemented on our databases capabilities that recognize that these 
databases will be accessed via the Internet, Tymnet, and DRANET and 
by people who are not necessarily librarians and who do not have a 
librarian anywhere nearby. We are working on software that 
automatically interrogates multiple databases for the user. Although 
we originally mounted a rather traditional database, LCMARC, we are 
now specializing and mounting databases like the LC authority files 
in order to support networked authority verification, full-text files that 
support document delivery, and imaging support. 

The issue of pricing is an area where we are making tremendous 
headway through our partnership with Information Access Co. (IAC). 
We are offering fixed-rate pricing for citation databases and will soon 
be offering site licensing of full-text databases. Of course, we have long 
been known for our ardent advocacy of standards implementation, and 
we continue that course. We understand that cooperation between 



136 CARL R. GRANT 



networks and, indeed, the very ability to network are absolutely 
contingent on standards. We are moving ahead on all of these needs 
and more because we believe that the networks are the access mechanism 
for the libraries of tomorrow. 



BRETT SUTTON 

Assistant Professor 

Graduate School of Library and Information Science 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 



Libraries and Networked Information Systems: 
Selected Bibliography 



This bibliography is intended to suggest background reading on the 
origins and emerging uses of electronic networks by libraries and higher 
education. It is not the purpose of this list to provide an exhaustive 
or comprehensive set of references in so wide-ranging and rapidly 
evolving a field as networking. The list does not focus, for example, 
on the technology of networking, local area networks, specific software 
applications, or the commercial aspects of networking, although all 
of these subjects are touched on occasionally in the sources cited here. 
The best source of current information about library networking is 
the Internet itself. Interested readers with network access who are willing 
to do some browsing will discover a variety of relevant and continuously 
updated discussion groups, electronic journals, information servers, and 
document archives devoted to these topics. 

Adams, R. J. (1990). Communication and delivery systems for librarians. 

Aldershot, England: Gower. 
Arms, C. (Ed.). (1988). Campus networking strategies. Bedford, MA: 

Digital Press. 
Arms, C. (Ed.). (1990). Campus strategies for libraries and electronic 

information. Bedford, MA: Digital Press. 
Arms, C. R. (1990). A new information infrastructure. Online, 14(b), 

15-22. 



137 



138 BRETT SUTTON 



Arms, C. R. (1990). Using the national networks: BITNET and the 

Internet. Online, 14(5), 24-29. 
Avram, H. D. (1987). Toward a nationwide library network. Journal 

of Library Administration, 5(3/4), 95-115. 
Avram, H. D. (1988). Building a unified information network. Library 

Hi Tech, 5(4), 117-119. 
Avram, H. D. (1989). Copyright in the electronic environment. 

EDUCOM Review, 24(3), 31-33. 
Bailey, C. W., Jr. (1991). Electronic (online) publishing in action.. .The 

public-access computer systems review and other electronic serials. 

Online, 75(1), 28-35. 
Bailey, C. W., Jr. (1991). Electronic serials on BITNET. Computers in 

Libraries, 11(4), 50. 
Bell, G. C. (1988). Gordon Bell calls for a U.S. research network. IEEE 

Spectrum, 25(2), 54-57. 
Bell, G. C. (1988). Steps toward a national research telecommunications 

network. Library Hi Tech, 6(1), 33-36. 
Bloch, E. (1988). A national network: Today's reality, tomorrow's vision, 

part 1. EDUCOM Bulletin, 23(2/3), 11-13. 
Brevik, P. S., & Shaw, W. (1989). Libraries prepare for an information 

age. Educational Record, 70(1), 12-19. 
Britten, W. A. (1990). BITNET and the Internet: Scholarly networks 

for librarians. College & Research Library News, 57(2), 103-107. 
Buckland, M. K., & Lynch, C. A. (1987). The Linked Systems Protocol 

and the future of bibliographic networks and systems. Information 

Technology and Libraries, 6(2), 83-88. 
Catlett, C. E. (1989). The NSFNET: Beginnings of a national research 

internet. Academic Computing, 3(5), 18-21. 
Cline, N. (1990). Information resources and the national network. 

EDUCOM Review, 25(2), 30-34. 
Communications, Computers and Networks. (1991). [Special Issue]. 

Scientific American, 255(3). 
Denenberg, R. (1990). Data communications and OSI. Library Hi Tech, 

5(4), 15-32. 
Fenly, J. G., & Wiggins, B. (1988). The Linked Systems Project: A 

networking tool for librarians. Dublin, OH: OCLC. 
Gore, A. (1990). Remarks on the NREN. EDUCOM Review, 25(2), 12-16. 
Gould, C. C. (Ed.). (1989). The information web: Ethical and social 

implications of computer networking. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 
Hall, S. C. (1991). The four stages of National Research and Education 

Network growth. EDUCOM Review, 26(1), 18-24. 
Henry, M.; Keenan, L.; & Reagan, M. (1991). Search sheets for OPACs 

on the Internet, 1992. Westport, CT: Meckler. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 139 



Hildreth, C. R. (1987). Library automation in North America: A 

reassessment of the impact of new technologies on networking. 

Munich: K. G. Saur. 
Holligan, P. J. (1986). Access to academic networks. London: Taylor 

Graham. 
Inter-University Committee on Computing and Standing Conference 

of National and University Libraries Information Services Working 

Party. (1990). Computer-based information services in universities. 

British Journal of Academic Librarianship, 5(1), 1-30. 
Kahn, R. E. (1988). A national network: Today's reality, tomorrow's 

vision, part 2. EDUCOM Bulletin, 23(2/3), 14-21. 
Kalin, S. W., & Tennant, R. (1991). Beyond OPACs...the wealth of 

information resources on the Internet. Database, 14(4), 28-33. 
Kibbey, M., & Evans, N. H. (1989). The network is the library. EDUCOM 

Review, 24(5), 15-20. 
LaQuey, T L. (1989). Networks for academics. Academic Computing, 

4(3), 32-39. 
LaQuey, T. L. (Ed.). (1990). The user's directory of computer networks. 

Bedford, MA: Digital Press. 
Learn, L. L. (1988). Networks: The telecommunications infrastructure 

and impacts of change. Library Hi Tech, 6(1), 13-31. 
Lynch, C. A. (1989). Library automation and the national research 

network. EDUCOM Review, 24(3), 21-26. 
Lynch, C. A. (1989). Linking library automation systems to the Internet: 

Functional requirements, planning, and policy issues. Library Hi 

Tech, 7(4), 7-18. 
Lynch, C. A. (1990). Information retrieval as a network application. 

Library Hi Tech, 8(4), 57-72. 
Lynch, C. A., & Preston, C. M. (1990). Internet access to information 

resources. In M. E. Williams (Ed.), Annual review of information 

science and technology (Vol. 25, pp. 263-312). Amsterdam: Elsevier 

Science. 
Lynch, C. A., & Preston, C. M. ( 1991 ). Evolution of networked information 

sources. In M. E. Williams (Ed.), 12th National Online Meeting 

Proceedings (pp. 221-230). Medford, NJ: Learned Information. 
McClure, C. R. (Ed.). (1991). The National Research and Education 

Network (NREN): Research and policy perspectives. New York: Ablex. 
McGill, M. J. (1989). Z39.50 benefits for designers and users. EDUCOM 

Review, 24(3), 27-30. 
Mitchell, M. M., & Saunders, L. M. (1991). The virtual library: An agenda 

for the 1990s. Computers in Libraries, 11(4), 8-11. 
Neubauer, K. W, & Dyer, E. R. (Eds.). (1990). European library networks. 

Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 



140 BRETT SUTTON 



Nielsen, B. (1990). PC monitor Finding it on the Internet: The next 

challenge for librarianship. Database, 13(5), 105-107. 
Osburn, C. B. (1989). The structuring of the scholarly communication 

system. College b Research Libraries, 50(3), 277-286. 
Palca, J. (1990). BITNET headed for new frontiers. Science, 247(4042), 

520. 
Palca, J. (1991). New journal will publish without paper. Science, 

253(5027), 1480. 
Parkhurst, C. A. (Ed.). (1990). Library perspectives on NREN: The 

National Research and Education Network. Chicago: Library and 

Information Technology Association. 
Quarterman, J. S. (1990). The matrix: Computer networks and 

conferencing systems worldwide. Bedford, MA: Digital Press. 
Schultz, B. (1988). The evolution of ARPANET. Datamation, 34(1$), 

71-74. 
Schuyler, M. (1990). Dial in: 1990-1991. An annual guide to library online 

public access catalogs in North America. Westport, CT: Meckler. 
Sloan, B. G. (1990). Linked systems for resource sharing. Boston: G. 

K. Hall. 
Slonim, J., & Bauer, M. A. (1990). The information utility project: 

Glimpse into the library of the future. Information Processing b 

Management, 26(4), 467-488. 
Strangelove, M., & Kovacs, D. (Comps). (1991). Directory of electronic 

journals, newsletters and academic discussion lists. Washington, DC: 

Association of Research Libraries. 
Sugnet, C. (Ed.). (1988). Networking in transition: Current and future 

issues. Library Hi Tech, 6(4), 101-119. 
Van Houweling, D. E. (1989). The national network: A national interest. 

EDUCOM Review, 24(2), 14-18. 
Weingarten, F. (1991). Five steps to NREN enlightenment. EDUCOM 

Review, 26(1), 26-30. 
Williams, B. (1991). A directory of computer conferencing for libraries. 

Westport, CT: Meckler. 
Woodsworth, A., & Wall, T. B. (1991). Understanding library cooperation 

and networks: A basic reader. New York: Neal-Schuman. 
Wright, K. (1990). The road to the global village. Scientific American, 

252(3), 83-85. 



CONTRIBUTORS 



CHARLES E. CATLETT is Manager of Networking Development at 
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), located 
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is principal 
investigator for NCSA's work developing applications and programming 
environments for the BLANCA gigabit-per-second network testbed, one 
of five such testbeds being coordinated by the Corporation for National 
Research Initiatives with funding from industry, the National Science 
Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The 
Networking Development group at NCSA is currently involved in 
gigabit applications, high-performance mass storage archives, wide area 
network needs analysis, and local area gigabit LANs. The scientific 
multimedia digital library is one of several applications being developed 
in Mr. Catlett's group for use on the BLANCA gigabit-per-second 
network testbed. Mr. Catlett received a B.S. in Computer Engineering 
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1983. 

CHARLES H. DAVIS is Professor of Library and Information Science 
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was also 
Dean from 1979 to 1986. Before coming to Illinois, he was Professor 
and Dean of the faculty of Library Science at the University of Alberta 
in Edmonton, Canada; he also taught at the University of Michigan 
and Drexel University. A chemist as well as an information scientist 
and librarian, Dr. Davis worked as an index editor for the Chemical 
Abstracts Service before entering academic life. He is a principal author 
of several books, including Guide to Information Science and Pascal 
Programming for Libraries. His research interests include computer- 
based retrieval techniques and interface design. He currently enjoys 
an appointment as Visiting Scholar at Indiana University in 
Bloomington, Indiana, where he resides with his wife, her dog, and 
his cat. 

CARL GRANT is Vice President of Marketing at Data Research 
Associates. He began at Data Research in 1984 as a Consultant and 
has held a variety of management positions within the company. 

141 



142 CONTRIBUTORS 



Previous to working for Data Research, he spent thirteen years in 
libraries where he implemented and managed library automation 
systems. Mr. Grant has an M.L.S. from the University of Missouri and 
is a participant in ALA, LITA, NISO, AVI AC, and CNI activities. 

KENNETH R. R. GROS LOUIS is Professor of English and 
Comparative Literature at Indiana University and is Vice President of 
Indiana University and Chancellor of the Bloomington campus. He 
has served since 1986 as Chairman of the Committee on Institutional 
Cooperation and has been a member of the Commission on Preservation 
and Access since 1986. In addition, he has served as a member and Chair 
of the Board of Directors of the Center for Research Libraries. 

M. E. L. JACOB is a writer, consultant, and publisher of Entrak. She 
teaches workshops in strategic planning and library networking. Ms. 
Jacob is active in a number of library and information science 
associations and societies and is a frequent speaker at conferences. She 
has worked at OCLC and in university, public, and special libraries. 

CLIFFORD LYNCH is the Director of the Division of Library 
Automation at the University of California Office of the President, where 
he is responsible for the MELVYL information system, one of the 
largest public access information retrieval systems in existence, as well 
as the computer internetwork linking the nine UC campuses. He has 
been at the University of California in various positions since 1979. 
Dr. Lynch has also been involved in a wide variety of research and 
development efforts in the application of advanced technologies to 
information management and delivery, including work with computer 
networking, information servers, database management systems, and 
imaging technologies. Dr. Lynch received his Ph.D. in Computer Science 
from the University of California at Berkeley. He participates in several 
standards activities (including the NISO Standards Development 
Committee), is Principal Investigator of various research grants, and 
is the author of several books and over fifty published papers. 

SUSAN K. MARTIN is University Librarian at Georgetown University. 
She received her Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies from the 
University of California, Berkeley. She has been active in library 
automation and networking since 1964 and has most recently become 
involved in an effort to define a strategic vision for librarianship. 

PAUL EVAN PETERS is Director of the Coalition for Networked 
Information, a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries, 
CAUSE, and EDUCOM that promotes creation of and access to 
information resources in networked environments in order to enrich 
scholarship and to enhance intellectual productivity. Before founding 



CONTRIBUTORS 143 



the Coalition in March 1990, Mr. Peters was Systems Coordinator at 
the New York Public Library from 1987 through 1989, and was Assistant 
University Librarian for Systems at Columbia University, where he also 
earned a masters degree in sociology, from 1979 through 1986. Mr. Peters 
holds a masters degree in library and information sciences from the 
University of Pittsburgh and, as an undergraduate, studied computer 
science and philosophy at the University of Dayton. Mr. Peters is 
currently President of the Library and Information Technology 
Association, is past-Chair of the National Information Standards 
Organization, and serves on the editorial boards of Library Hi Tech 
and Public Access Computer Systems Review. 

MARTIN RUNKLE is Director of the University of Chicago Library. 

JAMES E. RUSH is Executive Director of PALINET. He is also current 
Chair of the Regional OCLC Network Directors Advisory Committee 
(RONDAC) and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the National 
Information Standards Organization (NISO). Prior to joining PALINET 
in 1988, Dr. Rush was president of a consulting firm, and he continues 
to consult with libraries and information centers on automation through 
PALINET. Rush has a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Central 
Missouri State University and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the 
University of Missouri (Columbia). He is the coauthor (with Charles 
H. Davis) of two books on information science, has written extensively 
on computer, library, and information science, and is the editor of an 
eight-volume set of Library Systems Evaluation Guides and of a looseleaf 
update service Microcomputers for Libraries: Product Review and 
Procurement Guide (both published by his consulting firm). 

THOMAS W. SHAUGHNESSY is University Librarian at the University 
of Minnesota's Twin City Campus. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers 
University. He has published articles on a variety of administrative issues 
and is active in the Association of Research Libraries and the American 
Library Association. 

WILLIAM J. STUDER has been Director of Libraries at The Ohio 
State University since 1977. He holds the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees 
from Indiana University (the latter two in library/information science). 
He has given and published papers on a variety of library management 
and economy issues. 

BRETT SUTTON is on the faculty of the Graduate School of Library 
and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana- 
Champaign. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and an M.S. in Library 
Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His areas 



144 CONTRIBUTORS 



of interest include the sociology of knowledge, libraries and society, 
social science information sources, and information technology. 

JEFFREY TERSTRIEP is Project Leader in the Networking 
Development group at the National Center for Supercomputing 
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 
He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois 
at Urbana-Champaign. Presently, he is spearheading the effort to develop 
distributed applications on the BLANCA testbed, one of five national 
wide area gigabit networks. In addition, he is the architect of the Data 
Management Facility. He also teaches two courses at the community 
college: Beginning Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization. 



INDEX 



Prepared by Laurel Preece 

Abstracting and indexing (A&I) 
databases: electronic access to, 21, 
107; and personal scholarly 
publishing, 28-29 

Academic libraries: impact of electron- 
ic networks on, 30-32. See also 
Research libraries 

Academic Strategy, 125, 127 

Acquisitions: costs of library mater- 
ials, 53-56; effect of electronic 
networks on, 34 

Adams, R. J., 137 

Advanced Networks and Services 
(ANS): and the National Research 
and Education Network, 63; and 
SONET-level services, 16 

Advanced Research Project Agency: 
and the ARPANET, 3, 15, 47 

Advanced Technology Group. See 
Apple Computer Library 

American Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science: and 
electronic publishing, 7 

American Chemical Society: and 
electronic information distribu- 
tion, 24 

American Library Association (ALA). 
Library and Information Technol- 
ogy Association: and electronic 
networks, 9 

American Physics Society: and 
electronic information distribu- 
tion, 24 

ANS. See Advanced Networks and 
Services 

Apple Computer Library: and 
networking applications, 101 

Apple Macintosh (computer): and 
network access packages, 87 

Archie FTP: access to archives on 
electronic networks, 21 



Archival function of libraries: effect of 
electronic networks on, 34 

Archives, electronic: 7; on the Internet, 
86-87 

ARL. See Association of Research 
Libraries 

ARL Statistics, 1983-84, 107 

ARL Statistics, 1989-90, 105 

Arms, C. R., 137, 138 

ARPANET, 3, 15, 20 

Association of Research Libraries 
(ARL): and the Coalition for 
Networked Information, 58; costs of 
library materials, 53-54; in- 
terlibrary loan statistics, 125, 126 

ATLAS system (Data Research 
Associates Inc.): and the virtual 
library concept, 76 

Avram, H. D., 138 

Bailey, C. W., Jr., 138 

Battin, P., 76, 82 

Bauer, M. A., 140 

Behold Metatron: The Recording 

Angel, 30 
Bell, G. C., 138 
Berger, M. G., 25, 38 
BIMA (Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland 

Array): and digital access, 87, 89, 94 
BISDN (Broadband Integrated 

Services Digital Network): 

transmission speeds, 17 
BITNET, 3, 41, 71, 72; and electronic 

mail, 14; and evolution of the 

National Research and Education 

Network, 66 
Bloch, E., 138 
Brevik, P. S., 138 
Brin, David, 26, 38 
Britten, W. A., 138 



145 



146 



INDEX 



Broadband Integrated Services Digital 
Network (BISDN): transmission 
speeds, 17 

Brown, Rowland, 125 

Brownrigg, E. B., 15, 39 

BRS: and electronic networks, 4, 22; 
and the National Research and Ed- 
ucation Network, 69; workstation 
software and ILLINET Online, 103 

Buckland, Michael K., 25, 37, 38, 138 

Bulletin boards. See Electronic bulle- 
tin boards 

Business and industry. See Private 
sector 

CALL (Computer Access Linking 
Libraries): interface with PREPnet, 
79,80 

Campus-wide information systems 
(CWISs): and electronic networks, 
21,51 

CARL (Colorado Alliance of Research 
Libraries), 102; and book reviews 
from Choice, 7; and the virtual 
library concept, 76 

CARL Systems, 102 

Carnegie-Mellon University: and the 
virtual library concept, 76; 
electronic mail and online catalog 
users at, 103 

Catalogs, online: access on the 
Internet, 68-69; and electronic 
networks, 51; and library network- 
ing, 6; and the ideal library, 110; at 
the University of Chicago, 105, 
106-107 

Catlett, Charles E., 6, 77, 82, 84, 85, 
98, 138, 141 

CAUSE: and the Coalition for 
Networked Information, 58 

CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read Only 
Memory): bibliographies and 
indexes, 111, 114; effect on library 
local area networks, 4; effect on re- 
source sharing, 125; the University 
of Alaska oral history project, 101 

Center for Research Libraries, 119 

Chernow, R., 36, 38 

CIC (Committee on Institutional 
Cooperation), 11, 119, 120, 121 

CICNet, 11; and electronic networks, 
9; and library catalog search 
systems, 85-86 



Cisler, Steve, 11, 101, 103 

Clark, Roger, 11 

Cline, N., 138 

CM-2: and multimedia digital library 
applications, 94, 95, 96, 97 

Coalition for Networked Information: 
and electronic networks, 9, 58, 61; 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 70-71, 72, 78 

Colorado Alliance of Research 
Libraries. See CARL 

Commission on Preservation and 
Access, 119 

Committee on Institutional Coopera- 
tion (CIC), 11, 119, 120, 121 

Common carriers: and electronic 
networks, 16 

Communication: and the role of the 
librarian, 99-100 

"Communications, Computers and 
Networks," 138 

Competitive intelligence: and elec- 
tronic networks, 25-27 

CompuServe, 14, 68 

Computer Access Linking Libraries. 
See CALL 

Computer conferences. See Electronic 
conferences 

Conferences. See Electronic confer- 
ences 

Connectivity, 14-20, 41-42, 103; costs, 
130-131; international communica- 
tions links, 16 

Copyright: and electronic networks, 
19, 102; and multimedia, 27; and 
personal scholarly publishing, 28 

Costs: of archiving electronic data, 129; 
of computer printer paper, 131; of 
connectivity, 130-131; of interlibrary 
loan, 115-116, 125-126, 130; of 
Internet access, 131; of library 
materials, 53-56; of library network- 
ing, 118-122, 123-127, 128-131; of 
maintaining dual collections, 129, 
131; of networked resources com- 
pared with print resources, 55-56; 
of training, 129 

Council on Library Resources: and the 
economics of research libraries, 104 

CRAY Y-MP (computer): and 
multimedia digital library ap- 
plications, 94, 95, 97 



INDEX 



147 



Cryptographic technologies: and 
electronic networks, 20 

Cummings, Martin M., 104, 113, 117 

Current Cites, 35 

CWIS. See Campus-wide information 
systems 

Cybernautics: and electronic net- 
works, 53 

DARPA. See Defense Advanced Re- 
search Projects Agency 

Dartmouth College: and the Shake- 
speare database, 7; and the virtual 
library concept, 76 

Data Research Associates, 132, 134 

Daval, N., 107, 117 

Davis, Charles H., 38, 120, 141 

DBIL. See Distributed Biomedical 
Imaging Laboratory 

Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency (DARPA): and gigabits-per- 
second testbeds, 16 

DeGennaro, Dick, 124 

Denenberg, R., 138 

Department of Defense: and the 
ARPANET, 3, 15, 47; and the Inter- 
net, 15; and the National Research 
and Education Network, 63 

Department of Energy: and electronic 
networks, 47; and the National 
Research and Education Network, 
62,63 

DIALOG: and electronic networks, 4, 
22, 43; and the National Research 
and Education Network, 69; and the 
PALINET model for regional 
networking, 80; online databases, 6 

Digital libraries, 51, 85-87; and 
networked information resources 
and services, 50-53. See also 
Multimedia digital libraries 

Dillon, Martin, 11 

Disintermediation: and electronic 
networks, 22-24 

Distributed Biomedical Imaging 
Laboratory (DBIL): and 
multimedia digital library ap- 
plications, 97 

Dougan, W. L., 75, 82 

Dougherty, R. M., 75, 82 

Dowd, Sheila, 125 

Dowlin, K. E., 33, 38 

DRANET: 132-136 



Dyer, E. R., 139 

Earth, 26 

Earth Observing System (EOS): and 
digital access, 87 

EasyNet: and the PALINET model for 
regional networking, 80 

Economics of Research Libraries, 104 

EDUCOM: and the Coalition for 
Networked Information, 58; and 
the National Research and Educa- 
tion Network, 77 

EDUCOM National NET'91. See 
National NET'91 

EEC. See European Economic Com- 
munity 

Electronic bulletin boards, 129; access 
on the Internet, 86-87 

Electronic conferences, 6, 50; and the 
National Research and Education 
Network, 68 

Electronic Frontier Foundation: and 
electronic networks, 9 

Electronic mail, 6, 50; and the 
ARPANET, 20; and the BITNET, 
14; and CompuServe, 14; and the 
Internet, 14, 20; and MCIMAIL, 14; 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 68; and the 
PALINET model for regional 
networking, 79, 80; and USENET, 
14; at Carnegie-Mellon University, 
103; network billing algorithms, 92- 
93 

Electronic networks. See Networks, 
electronic 

Electronic publishing, 7, 50, 56, 129, 
131. See also Personal scholarly 
publishing 

End-user workstations, 24-29 

Environmental Protection Agency: 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 63 

EPIC Service (OCLC): and the 
PALINET model for regional 
networking, 80 

Ethical aspects of networks: 8, 30-34 

European Economic Community 
(EEC): and the establishment of 
international networks, 17 

Evans, N. H., 139 

Fast Fourier Transform. See FFT 



148 



INDEX 



Faxon Institute conference: and 
computer conferencing, 68 

FCCSET (Federal Computer Council 
for Science, Energy, and Technol- 
ogy): and the National Research 
and Education Network, 63 

Federal Communications Commission 
(FCC): and spectrum support for 
public wireless data communica- 
tions, 15-16 

Federal Computer Council for Science, 
Energy, and Technology. See 
FCCSET 

Federal Networking Council: and the 
National Research and Education 
Network, 63 

Fenly, J. G., 138 

FFT (Fast Fourier Transform): and 
multimedia digital library ap- 
plications, 93 

FIDONET, 5 

File transfer protocol (FTP): and access 
to electronic archives, 20, 21, 86-87 

FreeNet, 7 

FTP. See File transfer protocol; Archie 
FTP 

Getty Art History Information Pro- 
gram: access to multimedia re- 
sources, 27-28 

Getz, M., 77, 82 

Gibson, William, 14, 38 

Gore, Albert, Jr., 3, 15, 49, 61, 62, 138 

Gould, C. C, 138 

Grant, Carl R., 11, 132, 141 

Green, Harold, 17 

Gros Louis, Kenneth R. R., 118, 123, 
128, 142 

Gusack, Nancy, 38 

Haas, J. Warren, 117 

Hall, S. C, 138 

Hat Creek radio telescope: and multi- 
media digital library applications, 
89, 93-94 

Health and medical information: 
access at public libraries, 33 

Henry, M., 138 

High-Performance Computing Act of 
1991: and the National Research 
and Education Network, 3, 63-64 

High-Performance Computing and 
Communications Initiative, 15 



High-volume print facilities: and 

electronic networks, 51-52 
Hildreth, C. R., 139 
Holligan, P. J., 139 
Hubble Space Telescope: and digital 

access, 87 
Human Genome Project: and digital 

access, 87 
Hunt, Paul M., 11, 118, 123, 128 

IAC. See Information Access Co. 

IBM: and Advanced Networks and 
Services, 16, 63; and electronic 
networks, 47 

ILCSO, 103 

ILL. See Interlibrary loan 

ILLINET (Illinois Library Network) 
Online, 103 

Illinois Library Computer Systems 
Office (ILCSO), 103 

INCOLSA (Indiana Cooperative Li- 
brary Services Authority): proposal 
for a multilevel national network, 
76-77 

Indiana University, 119 

Information Access Co., 103, 135 

Information and Information Systems, 
37 

Information technology and libraries. 
See Networks, electronic 

Innes, H. A., 13, 38 

Integrated Services Digital Network 
(ISDN): transmission speeds, 17 

Intelligent databases: and electronic 
networks, 52-53 

Inter-University Committee on 
Computing and Standing Confer- 
ence of National and University 
Libraries Information Services 
Working Party, 139 

Interlibrary loan, 31, 115-116, 125-126, 
130, 134 

Internet, 5, 21, 41; access issues, 10, 131; 
and CARL online systems, 102; and 
data havens, 19; and Data Research 
databases, 135; and digital libraries, 
85-87; and DRANET, 132; and 
electronic mail, 14, 20; and 
government networks, 15; and 
ILLINET Online, 103; and K-12 
institutional connectivity, 85; and 
library catalogs, 51; and the 
National Research and Education 



INDEX 



149 



Network, 66, 67; and OPACs, 128- 
129; and PREPnet, 79; and remote 
access, 91-93; and the University of 
Chicago, 105; archive access, 86-87; 
connectivity, 14; control issues, 9; 
cost structure, 93; growth of, 3, 4, 
84-85, 86; transmission speeds, 16 
ISDN (Integrated Services Digital 
Network): transmission speeds, 17 

Jacob, M. E. L., 99, 142 

Johns Hopkins University: and the 

Knowledge Management process, 

35 

Kahn, R. E., 139 

Kalin, S. W., 139 

Keenan, L., 138 

Keller, George, 125, 127 

Kibbey, M., 139 

Kilgour, Frederick, G., 75, 82 

"Knowbots": and electronic networks, 

52-53 

Knowledge Management process, 35 
Koenig, M. E. D., 75, 82 
Kovacs, D., 140 
Kuttner, R., 18, 38 

LaQuey, T. L., 139 

Larsen, Ron, 43, 44, 45 

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories: 
multimedia digital library ap- 
plications, 97 

LCMARC database: access through 
DRANET, 132-133, 135 

Leadership: librarians and informa- 
tion technology, 111-112; librarians 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 71-72 

Learn, L. L., 139 

Legal aspects of electronic networks, 
8, 19. See also Copyright 

Lehigh University: and the virtual 
library concept, 76 

LEXIS, 22, 43, 114 

Library and Information Technology 
Association: and electronic net- 
works, 9 

Library networking. See Networks, 
electronic 

Library of Congress, 25, 38; and the 
National Research and Education 
Network, 63 



Library of Congress machine-readable 
cataloging. See LCMARC 

Library of Congress Network Advisory 
Committee: and a proposal for a 
multilevel national network, 77 

Library schools: and electronic net- 
works, 36-38 

Lichtenstein, A., 107, 117 

Likins, Peter, 66, 73, 77, 78, 82 

LISTSERV software: and computer 
conferencing, 3 

Listservers, 129 

Local area networks: access to online 
catalogs, 101-102; at the University 
of Chicago, 105; NSFNET ar- 
chitecture, 85 

Loken, S. C, 24, 38 

Lombardi, J. T., 75, 82 

Lucier, R. E., 35, 38 

Lucky, R. W., 26, 38 

Lynch, Clifford A., 5, 12, 15, 22, 25, 
38, 39, 101, 138, 139, 142 



Machine-readable cataloging. See 

MARC 
Macintosh computers: and network 

access packages, 87 
MARC: and library networking, 4 
Martin, Susan K., 142 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 

Project INTREX, 103 
McAdams, A. K., 75, 82 
McClure, C. R., 139 
McGill, M. J., 139 
MCI: and Advanced Networks and 

Services, 16; and electronic networks, 

47; and the National Research and 

Education Network, 63 
MCIMAIL, 14 
MEDLINE: and access to health and 

medical information at public 

libraries, 33 
MELVYL system, 6 
Merit: and the National Research and 

Education Network, 63 
MILNET, 15 

MIT: Project INTREX, 103 
Mitchell, M. M., 139 
Molholt, P., 76, 82 
Multimedia: and electronic networks, 

27-28; impact on elementary 

schools and high schools, 27 



150 



INDEX 



Multimedia digital libraries: access to 
data, 89-93; and electronic net- 
works, 84-98; and the Internet, 85- 
87; atmospheric sciences ap- 
plication, 94-97; biomedical imag- 
ing application, 97-98; contents of, 
87-89; data storage, 89; directory 
services, 89-90; National Center for 
Supercomputing Applications 
prototype, 89-98; network ar- 
chitectures and protocols, 90-93; 
radio astronomy application, 93-94 

National Aeronautics and Space Ad- 
ministration (NASA): and electron- 
ic networks, 47; and the Internet, 
15; and the National Research and 
Education Network, 63 

National Agricultural Library (NAL): 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 63; text- 
digitizing project, 101 

National Center for Supercomputing 
Applications (NCSA): and multi- 
media digital libraries, 7, 84-98 

National Information Standards Or- 
ganization (NISO), 134 

National Library of Medicine (NLM): 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 63 

National NET'91: and the National 
Research and Education Network, 
61, 66, 77; digital library dem- 
onstration, 90, 91 

National Research and Education 
Network (NREN), 41, 61-73, 135; 
access, 67-70; access costs, 65-66, 70- 
71, 131; and computer conferencing, 
68; and electronic mail, 68; and 
electronic publishing, 129; and 
library networking, 3-4; and 
National NET'91, 77; and OCLC, 
68; and RLG, 68; and the Coalition 
for Networked Information, 78; 
capacity of, 3; connectivity issues, 
14-15; evolution of, 66; governance 
structure, 62-64; leadership roles, 71- 
72; legislation, 62-64; role of for- 
profit organizations in network 
development, 65; role of librarians 
in network development, 64-65; 
school and library connectivity, 64- 
65; scope and benefits, 77-78 



National Science Foundation (NSF): 
and electronic networks, 47; and 
gigabits-per-second testbeds, 16; 
and the Internet, 15; and the 
National Research and Education 
Network, 3, 63; and the NSFNET, 
41,85 

NCSA. See National Center for Super- 
computing Applications 

Neal, Jim, 120, 122 

Network File System (NFS [Sun Mi- 
crosystems]): and remote access to 
data, 91-92 

Networked information resources and 
services. See Networks, electronic 

Networks, electronic: advanced, 41-48; 
authorization and resource control, 
102; bibliography, 137-140; budget- 
ing for library networking, 120-121; 
cooperation and library network- 
ing, 121-122; database search ca- 
pabilities, 133; delivery processes, 
134; development of new mar- 
ketplaces, 18, 57-58; development of 
the information refiner, 29-30; 
directories to resources, 102; effect 
on traditional bibliographic 
services, 133-135; ethical aspects, 8, 
30-34; governance issues, 62-64, 1 19- 
120; information utilities, 22; in- 
ternational communications mo- 
nopolies, 16; legal considerations, 
8, 19; metaphors for networking 
technology, 48-50; multimedia, 27- 
28; origins, 3-5, 66; performance 
levels, 44-47; politics of, 127; 
proposal for a multilevel national 
network, 76-77; public rights versus 
property rights, 100; repercussions 
of data availability, 26; reporting 
lines and library networking, 122; 
research and education networks, 
47-48; resource sharing and library 
networking, 124-126; resources and 
services, 20-24, 40-60, 128-130; 
service to the private sector, 74-83; 
specialization of databases, 133; 
standards, 4, 6, 134; system bound- 
aries, 100; training of information 
professionals, 36-38; transmission 
speeds, 17, 44-47; user interfaces, 
134. See also Academic libraries; 
ARPANET; BITNET; Connectiv- 



INDEX 



151 



ity; Costs; Internet; MILNET; 
National Research and Education 
Network; NSFNET; Public librar- 
ies; Research libraries; Special 
libraries 

Neubauer, K. W., 139 

NEXIS: 114 

NeXT: multimedia mail system, 27 

NFS. See Network File System 

Nielsen, B., 140 

NISO (National Information Stan- 
dards Organization), 134 

North Carolina State University: text- 
digitizing project, 101 

NREN. See National Research and Ed- 
ucation Network 

NSFNET, 3, 41; access to high-end 
specialized equipment, 20; ar- 
chitecture, 85; electronic mail, 50; 
evolution of the National Research 
and Education Network, 66, 68; 
growth of connectivity, 42; 
performance levels, 44-47; 
transmission speeds, 16 

OCLC, 4, 43, 135; and electronic 
publishing, 7; and the Internet, 51; 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 68; and the 
proposal for a multilevel national 
network, 77, 81; and the virtual 
library concept, 123 

Office of Management and Budget: 
and the National Research and 
Education Network, 63 

Office of Science and Technology 
Planning: and the National Re- 
search and Education Network, 15 

Office of Science and Technology 
Policy: and the National Research 
and Education Network, 63 

Office of Technology Assessment, 18, 
19,39 

Ohio State University Libraries: in- 
terlibrary loan, 130 

Online Journal of Current Clinical 
Trials, 1 

OPACs (online public access catalogs), 
4, 6; and interlibrary loan, 130; and 
resource sharing, 125; and the 
Internet, 128-129; and the virtual 
library concept, 124 

Osburn, C. B., 140 



Palca, J., 140 

PALINET (Pennsylvania Area Library 

Network): model for regional 

planning with emphasis on the 

private sector, 76, 78-81 
PALS (Project for Automated Library 

System [Unisys Corp.]): and the 

virtual library concept, 76 
Paperwork Reduction Act, 71 
Parkhurst, C. A., 140 
Pennsylvania Area Library Network. 

See PALINET 
Pennsylvania Research and Economic 

Partnership network. See PREPnet 
Penrod, Jim, 127 
Personal scholarly publishing, 7, 28- 

29 

Peters, Paul Evan, 5, 17, 40, 142 
Pfaffenberger, B., 22, 39 
Pikes Peak Library District: and the 

virtual library concept, 76 
Point-of-sale (POS) technology: and 

electronic networks, 26 
PREPnet (Pennsylvania Research and 

Economic Partnership network): 

interface with CALL, 79, 80 
Preservation: and electronic networks, 

8,56 

Preston, C. M., 22, 38, 39, 139 
Private sector: and the library, 74-83; 

and the PALINET model for 

regional networking, 78-81 
Project for Automated Library System. 

See PALS 

Project INTREX: annotation of bib- 
liographic records with notes, 103 
Project Jukebox: oral history project 

on CD-ROM at the University of 

Alaska, 101 
Public bulletin boards. See Electronic 

bulletin boards 
Public libraries: impact of electronic 

networks on, 32-33 
Public rights versus property rights: 

and electronic networks, 100 

Quarterman, John S., 14, 39, 79, 82, 
140 

Reagan, M., 138 
Reitmeier, Glenn, 88 
Research libraries: characteristics of 
the ideal library, 109-110; criteria in 



152 



INDEX 



quality assessment, 126; economics 
of, 104-1 17; and electronic networks, 
1-3; and electronic network leader- 
ship, 5; networking applications, 
99-103; politics of library network- 
ing, 127; standards in quality 
assessment, 126 

Research Libraries Group (RLG): and 
the Internet, 51; and the National 
Research and Education Network, 
68; interlibrary loan statistics, 126 

Research Libraries Information 
Network (RLIN), 4, 43; and the 
virtual library concept, 123-124 

Resource sharing: and electronic 
networks, 115-116, 124-126. See also 
Interlibrary loan 

Richards, Berry, 82 

Richardson, E. C, 115, 117 

RLG. See Research Libraries Group 

RLIN. See Research Libraries In- 
formation Network 

RS/6000 workstations: and 
multimedia digital library ap- 
plications, 96 

Runkle, Martin, 9, 104, 143 

Rush, James E., 74, 76, 77, 82, 83, 143 

Saunders, L. M., 139 

Scholarly publishing. See Personal 
scholarly publishing 

Schultz, B., 140 

Schuyler, M., 140 

Self-publishing. See Personal scholar- 
ly publishing 

Senate Energy Committee: and the 
National Research and Education 
Network, 62, 63 

Senate Labor and Education Commit- 
tee: and the National Research and 
Education Network, 62 

Senate Science and Technology 
Committee: and the National Re- 
search and Education Network, 63 

Shakespeare database, 7 

Shaughnessy, Thomas W., 118, 123, 
128, 143 

Shaw, Ward, 11, 102, 138 

Simple mail transport protocol 
(SMTP): and electronic mail, 92-93 

Sloan, Bernard G., 11, 103, 140 

Slonim, J., 140 

Smarr, L. L., 85, 98 



SMDS (Switched Multi-Megabyte Data 
Services): and transmission speeds, 
16-17 

SMTP (simple mail transport proto- 
col): and electronic mail, 92-93 

Space requirements: and electronic 
networks, 53 

Special libraries: impact of electronic 
networks on, 32 

St. George, A., 21, 39 

Standards: for information retrieval, 4, 
6, 134 

Sterling, Bruce, 19, 39 

Strangelove, M., 140 

Stubbs, Kendon, 105, 107, 117 

Studer, William J., 118, 123, 128, 143 

Sugnet, C., 140 

Supercomputers: and networked in- 
formation resources and services, 50 

Sutton, Brett, 11, 38, 120, 137, 143 

Switched Multi-Megabyte Data 
Services (SMDS): transmission 
speeds, 16-17 

System boundaries: and electronic 
networks, 100 

Tennant, R., 139 
Terstriep, Jeffrey A., 6, 84, 144 
Training, 36-38, 129 
Tymnet, 135 

UNCOVER: and the Internet, 102 
UNCOVER II: and the Internet, 102 
United States Congress. Office of 

Technology Assessment. See Office 

of Technology Assessment 
University Microfilms: and ILLINET 

Online, 103 
University of Alaska (Fairbanks): oral 

history project on CD-ROM, 101 
University of California (Berkeley): 

Current Cites and new roles for 

libraries, 35 
University of California (Los Angeles) 

film and television archives: access 

to multimedia resources, 27 
University of California (Oakland): 

MELVYL system, 6; WAIS Station, 

101 
University of Chicago: access to online 

databases in the Law Library, 114; 

electronic networking at, 105-106 
University of Illinois. Biomedical 



INDEX 153 



Magnetic Resonance Laboratory: 
multimedia digital library ap- 
plications, 97 

University of Minnesota libraries: 
interlibrary loan at, 125 

UNIX-to-UNIX copy protocol 
(UUCP): and electronic mail, 92-93 

USENET, 5, 14 

Van Houweling, D. E., 140 

Victor isz, T., 75, 82 

Virtual library, 8, 9, 76, 81, 105, 123- 

124, 131 
Voges, Mickie, 11 

WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) 
Station: and storage of mixed media 
information, 101 

Waldhart, Tom, 125, 127 

Wall, T. B., 140 

Weingarten, R, 140 

WELL, 5 

WESTLAW: ownership versus access, 
114 

Wetherbee, Lou, 11 

White House Conference on Library 
and Information Services, 71 

Wide Area Information Server. See 
WAIS 

Wiggins, B., 138 

Williams, B., 140 

Wilson: online databases, 6, 103 

Wireless communication: and network 
connectivity, 15-16 

Woodsworth, A., 140 

Workstations: and electronic net- 
works, 24-29 

Worldnet, 26 

Wright, K., 140 

Yurick, Sol, 30, 39 
Z39.50, 6, 134 



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