Association of Research Libraries Collections & Access for the 21st Century Scholar: A Forum to Explore the Roles of the Research Library

The Scholarly Landscape: Looking at Needs and Changes by Discipline

Suzanne E. Thorin
October 19, 2001
With Joseph Branin and Frances Groen

The article that Joe, Frances, and I completed three years ago notes that humanities research in universities has been eclipsed since the end of World War II by ever growing support for science and technology research. Library collections’ budgets reflect this reality. Not only have we favored the purchase of science publications over the humanities, we have decreased our humanities budgets ever further because of our need to meet the sometimes phenomenal increases in prices for science journals. A number of scholars, researchers, journal editors, and others are experimenting with electronic processes that move traditional and expensive editing, peer review, and publishing processes into a completely online environment. Many would have us believe that most, if not all, scientific communication and output will be electronic in the future.

The average ARL library now spends nearly 13 percent of its collections budget on electronic resources. At the same time, an ever-growing portion of our print collections–that now total some 409 million volumes in ARL libraries–are being placed in high-density storage units off campus, if they are used less than several times each year. It is possible and even probable that in a decade or less smaller university and college libraries will be able to support their users in a nearly total electronic environment and will share responsibility with other libraries when buying or retaining print materials.

In the few minutes I have today, I will concentrate on the scholarly environment in the academy and how its various inflections and fluctuations might affect our libraries. I will discuss two very different topics, and I hope that my comments will become a catalyst for other discussions. My intent today is to raise strategic issues for discussion, not to determine answers. With an ever increasing awareness of the complex world of research and scholarship, we should be more able to build collections and services that effectively support research that ultimately seeks to improve the physical health and the environment in our world.

The events of September 11^th changed that world. Those events will continue to influence how we live and work. This is, therefore, the right time to ask if the scope, direction, and support of research in the academy will change with the advent of the continued war on terrorism. If it does, will we in libraries be ready to provide the appropriate collections and expertise?

Only last April, the New York Times reported that videotapes, manuals, and notebooks on bomb making that had been seized from a Palestinian serving time in federal prison were not translated before the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, nor were the taped phone calls he made. The documents and calls were in Arabic and it appears that no one was available to translate them. In our Post-Soviet world, one that has been characterized as being ever more English-centric, the importance of reading the languages and understanding the cultures of individual countries has actually increased dramatically. Yet our government and its intelligence agencies lack a sufficient number of people who have language skills or cultural knowledge.

According to government figures, American colleges and universities graduated only nine students who majored in Arabic last year. For the past 25 years, only 8.2 percent of American college and university students enrolled in foreign language courses, and nearly all of these students specialized in Spanish, French, and German. Actually, the Defense and State Departments run the largest schools for training foreign language speakers. The Defense Language Training Institute reports that the languages the military considers critical are not those generally taught in universities. The Institute graduated 409 students in Arabic and 120 in Farsi in the year 2000. Dr. Ray Clifford, provost of the Institute, said he could not find any figures on how many students study Farsi in colleges and universities.

In the late 1950’s when the Soviets launched Sputnik, that event triggered a national effort to increase dramatically the country’s knowledge of science, mathematics, and languages. Government money was channeled into universities for research and teaching. The science agenda was expanded through National Science Foundation support and language programs became areas studies programs through funds provided by the National Defense Education Act, the precursor to what is now Title VI support.

For years, Indiana University Bloomington has nurtured area studies programs and has been a major recipient of Title VI grants. The department now called Central Eurasian Studies was originally founded in 1943 during World War II, as an Army Specialized Training Program for Central Eurasian Studies. In 1956 it evolved into the Program in Uralic and Altaic Studies and finally became a full department for the study of central Eurasian languages and culture in 1965. The origin of this program is not uncommon, nor is its growth into the research fabric of the university. Since September 11^th, the military has been contacting Central Eurasian Studies and others on our campus and across the country to locate people who speak and understand Turkmen, Farsi, Pashto, Dari, and other languages of the areas in and near Afghanistan. The only university center for Afghanistan Studies in the U.S. is located on the University of Nebraska’s Omaha campus, not on the main campus at Lincoln. In part, the university has funded this center since 1973 to make Nebraska a player in international studies.

There is no doubt that ARL libraries contain collections of incredible depth in Arabic and Persian/Farsi and that support area studies in Central Asia and the Near and Middle East. Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University have the largest collections of materials and programs to study the languages, culture, and politics of Afghanistan. The Library of Congress holds a sizeable collection of materials in Pashto and Dari, the two official languages of Afghanistan. At Indiana, we collect heavily in the languages of Uzbek, Tibetan, Kazakh, Mongolian, and Turkmen.

With mature area studies programs at Columbia, New York University, Washington, Indiana, and elsewhere and with incredible collections available nationally, one might ask how the chain broke between the universities’ rich programs and the needs in the government. I asked a faculty member, a former dean of international programs at Indiana University, for his opinion. He spoke of the CIA’s intense concentration on technology and its neglect of languages and culture. One could also argue that the programs in universities became isolated academic endeavors. In recent weeks, enrollment in Arabic language courses has risen sharply, according to Rusty Rook, the assistant director of the University of Chicago’s Middle Eastern Studies program. At Princeton University, Arabic 101 has increased to 26 students from last year’s total of nine. But, it could take months and perhaps years to grow the required expertise.

If the Government decides to take better advantage of the riches already found in universities, are the universities ready to respond? Will they? And if they do, what changes should occur in libraries? I asked Indiana’s former dean for his thoughts. He pondered my question and answered that he thought that more contemporary and ever more obscure publications might be collected (including electronic resources). A shift might occur toward collections he characterized as those that respond to issues of high civilization.

Some of the questions we might consider are: Are we prepared for greater use of the collections we already have? Do we even own or have access to the collections and information needed today? Do we have the expertise on our staff, both of countries and languages, to assist what may become revitalized areas of the university’s research and teaching? Do we have enough staff with expertise in maps, both print and electronic? Do librarians communicate effectively across reference, area studies, and government documents units? Would such an expansion change our preservation and digitization priorities? These are just a few questions to think about, even as we continue to struggle with the dominance of the sciences.

Which brings me to the second topic–are the sciences moving in lockstep toward total electronic communication? In our article, we touched briefly on the different communication traditions within scholarly disciplines. We noted that some disciplines, e.g., mathematics, regularly use back issues of journals, but that for the most part it is the humanities that consult older materials. We quoted Blaise Cronin, Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana, who cautioned, "our ex cathedra pronouncements about publishing really should be grounded in the multiple realities of tribal life in academe." We also referred to a 1998 article by Rob Kling and Geoffrey McKim who have studied the differences within disciplines in the sciences and who have concluded that these differences are noteworthy. With the support of a National Science Foundation grant, the authors have continued their research and published another article last year in the Journal of American Society for Information Science. This article–and I recommend it highly–concludes that the premise that all scientific disciplines will follow high-energy physics into a "stable set of electronic forums" is false. They disagree with the notion that it is just a matter of time before other scientific fields catch up and the community settles on a stable set of electronic forums, including preprint servers, discussion lists, and electronic journals. They argue that important social forces centered on disciplinary constructions of trust and of legitimate communication pull against convergence. Their analysis concludes "that communicative plurality and communicative heterogeneity are durable features of the scholarly landscape, and that we are likely to see field differences in the use of and meaning ascribed to communications forums persist, even as overall use of electronic communications technologies both in science and in society as a whole increases."

Kling and McKim compare the social practices of three disciplines: high-energy physics, molecular biology, and information systems. The conditions in high energy physics: long projects, large budgets, and equipment only available in a few laboratories have contributed to the sharing of papers even before the Web and, even more important, before the use of any electronic communication. Sharing preprints in molecular biology, on the other hand, is done only within limited invisible colleges. Broader access only comes with journal publication. In information systems, the E-print server, ISWORLD, is not a repository for the full text of working papers that have not undergone peer review. Kling and McKim believe that the claim of Ginsparg, Harnad, and Odlyzko that the near universal adoption of a single model for electronic scholarly publishing is just plain wrong. The fit of the technology must be compatible with the working style of a community or it will not be successful.

The authors discuss the role that trust plays in communication and how certain disciplines prefer peer-reviewed articles especially when the topic is outside their direct expertise. The four social conditions that shape communication practices are: first, research project costs; second, mutual visibility of ongoing work; third, degree of industrial integration; and fourth, the degree of concentration of communication channels, especially journals. They also discuss the growth of what they call p-e journals, those journals that circulate in paper but have electronic versions that add new features, such as searchable abstracts, full text of articles, lists of articles under review, contacts for preprints of articles, hot articles, links to other journals and data sets, even while they keep control over web posting and peer review. The real growth area presently, say the authors, is in p-e journals, not electronic only journals.

Kling and McKim believe we are still in an experimental age. They advise us to watch the growth of p-e journals, those journals that create electronic enhancements to print publications. P-e journals are the real growth area, both in number and in elaboration, not electronic-only journals. They caution us that Ginsparg’s unrefereed working articles are a practice only in some areas of physics and a few cognate mathematical and chemical subfields and that they do not expect biological or chemical specialties to embrace the high-energy physics model.

So how does this information inform librarians? I recall Nicholson Baker’s description of how our profession embraced too fully the notion that microforms would solve all our space and preservation problems and would eventually even enable us to put everything the Library of Congress owns on the head of a pin. Simple solutions to complex problems should cause us to step back and get more information. Just as the microforms dream created complex problems that are still with us today, climbing on the "all sciences are the same and will be electronic in a few years" bandwagon is probably not helpful to the support we owe to our users.

Most faculty concentrate on specific disciplines and sub-disciplines and are not aware of subtle differences in other areas. I suggest that it would help us to look more closely at the details in the landscape of scholarly communication as we seek solutions for the escalating costs of science materials and prepare for the future.

Ash, L. (1993) Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada. New Providence, NJ: R.R. Bowker Co.

Branin, J., Groen, F., & Thorin, S. (2000, January). The Changing Nature of Collection Management in Research Libraries. Library Resources & Technical Services. 44(1), 23-32.

Center for Social Informatics, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington. Web page accessed October 24, 2001: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/csi/.

Committee on Governmental Affairs. (2000, September). The State of Foreign Language Capabilities in National Security and the Federal Government (S.HRG.106-801). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Edwards, B. (2001, October 15) Richard Lindheim of the Institute for Creative Technologies, talks about Hollywood’s brainstorming with the military. Transcript of the program Morning Edition on National Public Radio.

Guédon, J.-C. (2001, October). Beyond Core Journals and Licenses: The Paths to Reform Scientific Publishing. ARL Bimonthly Report. 218.

Kling, R., & McKim, G. (1998, April). The Shaping of Electronic Media in Supporting Scientific Communication: The Contribution of Social Informatics. Paper presented at the European Science and Technology Forum: Electronic Communication and Research in Europe, Darmstad/Seeheim. Retrieved October 12, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/kling/pubs/seeheim.htm.

Kling, R., & McKim, G. (2000, December). Not Just a Matter of Time: Field Differences and the Shaping of Electronic Media in Supporting Scientific Communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 51(14), 1306-1320.

Lynch, C. (1999, April). On the Threshold of Discontinuity: The New Genres of Scholarly Communication and the Role of the Research Library. Paper presented at the Association of College and Research Libraries National Conference, Detroit. Retrieved October 12, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ala.org/acrl/clynch.html.

Schemo, D. (2001, April 16). Use of English as World Tongue is Booming, and so is Concern. New York Times. pp. A1

Worth, R. (2001, October 1). A Nation Challenged: Intelligence; Agents Wanted. Should Speak Pashto. New York Times. pp. B7

Wilgoren, J. (2001, October 6). Public Lives; In Nebraska, an Oasis of Insight into Afghanistan’s Heart. New York Times. pp. A8

ARL Home | Collections & Access for the 21st Century Scholar Forum

© Association of Research Libraries, Washington, DC
Maintained by ARL Web Administrator
Last Modified: October 25, 2001