Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994
Millicent Abell, Convener, Yale University
Myles Brand, University of Oregon
Robert Berdahl, University of Texas
Richard Ekman, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
MR. BRAND: To continue the conversation, let me take a moment to rehash and recast the recommendations in a different way. Let me talk now in terms of the functional similarities between the recommendations rather than dividing them up by task forces. I note also that the recommendations from these three groups cover a broad range of actions as well as policies proposed for further study.
The most significant changes called for in the recommendations are these:
Research universities should move away from building and maintaining self-sufficient library collections toward building a distributed national collection maintained through new formal cooperative arrangements involving collective funding and shared government. The Scientific and Technological Information Task Force and the Foreign Acquisitions Task Force were strongest in this regard.
Universities should create a more competitive and cost-based market for scientific and technological publications by increasing the presence of not-for-profit organizations in science and technology publishing. This speaks to a new role in particular for the university presses.
The AAU in cooperation with ARL should continue to examine new ways of managing intellectual property, including the prospects for university or faculty retention of copyright. When I talk to various faculty groups about these topics, particularly intellectual property rights, I say, with respect to journals, "What you are essentially doing is giving away your copyright and then buying it back." The money that the library spends is money that cannot be spent elsewhere in the university. They are very surprised to learn this, but, of course, that is what has been happening.
Where do we go from here? We have a major question about what the leadership and governance model should be for the next phase of this project--namely, implementing the recommendations--and we need to create it in a way that we should expect it to carry over, in some form, to the future implementation of the national distributed library, or portions of it.
I see at least three models, and I hope during the discussion period we can address the pros and cons of each of these models. One is an AAU leadership model: the presidents and chancellors taking the leadership with direct input from ARL as well as the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)--especially with the managing of social sciences--and with the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences (AAAS) representing science, technology, and energy. The second model is a joint collaborative governance/leadership role played by AAU and ARL with ACLS, AAAS, and perhaps the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) providing direct input. The governance would come from AAU and ARL. The third model, which is the most inclusive, involves full partnership of at least the AAU, ARL, ACLS, AAAS, and perhaps AAUP university presses, with probably other groups, as well, playing a supporting role. So those three models are ordered in terms of inclusiveness.
My own personal preference is for the second one--having ARL and AAU play a definitive leadership and governance role and bringing in the other parties as necessary. Others may want to suggest that a less inclusive, or perhaps a more inclusive, approach is the better one. I would like to get some feedback on that issue.
A second related issue is: how are we going to fund the next stage of the project? Well, there are some obvious sources. My guess is that we will have to mix and match the best we can in order to carry on this project. First, of course, will be sharing by the institutions that will be directly involved in the pilot projects, such as the pilot projects that are initiated through the Foreign Acquisitions Task Force. Or, will it be all the AAU institutions or all the institutions represented by the ARL? Second, there will be institution-specific investments necessary, most especially investments in technology. As you recall, one of the major recommendations of the STI task force was that each institution should put itself in a position to take advantage of the technological and communications advances that are being made, including wiring the last hundred feet. And third, perhaps on an individual subproject basis, will be an appeal to foundations in order to move the project forward, at least in the key areas. My expectation is that all of these mechanisms will be necessary.
I want to make a few additional points. Most of these are reemphasizing issues that have come up briefly in the early part of the discussion and were talked about in the various task force reports. First, notice we are talking about a North American distributed collection. The role of Canada as a critical player cannot be overstated. Canada has already made progress in these areas; through their relationship in both the ARL and the AAU, they should be considered a full member.
But it is more than just North America. International cooperation will be necessary for certain success. The United Kingdom has already begun a project very similar to this one and there may be opportunities to connect. Of course, as we move forward in the various pilot projects and beyond those pilot projects, international relationships will play a key role.
We need to initiate, moreover, a systematic set of conversations on university campuses amongst faculty, librarians, administrators, and students in order to make these changes. As I mentioned earlier, and as I am sure Mr. Berdahl will address, changing the faculty culture will be absolutely essential for success. We cannot have faculty members throw up their arms and walk out of the room. That will not work. It will fall most importantly to the presidents and chancellors to support the library directors' efforts in this regard; I take that to be an absolutely necessary condition for success.
It is time also to begin systematic conversations with publishers. An expanded role for university presses in the electronic environment, at least initially in science and technology publishing for journals and serials, will be critical. But even more so, most university presses are either subsidized or barely breaking even at this point. They are becoming more marginalized on our campuses as financial constraints impose themselves upon us.
Some rethinking about capital investment in the university presses will be necessary to make this happen. Again, that is a campus-based issue of some importance. If we are to create a competitive environment, especially in journal and serial publications, it will be necessary to enable the university presses to play an important role. I would say a similar point should be made about academic society publishing like the American Psychological Association (APA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), and so on. That would be the next step out, the next concentric circle.
Of course there will be concerns expressed by the commercial publishers as we try to create a competitive environment to bring down the prices. That, I expect, if not handled well, could turn into a potential issue. The governance group will have to address that directly.
Discussions with key officials in appropriate federal agencies will form another component to the implementation process. The Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation are among the administrative groups that should be involved very early on, especially with the Scientific and Technological Information Task Force recommendations. The suggestion of requiring a copy of federally funded research results to be deposited in a federally maintained public access electronic database will be crucial to a wide-ranged success in science and technology.
In some areas, such as high-energy physics, projects like the Los Alamos project have evolved, but have done so on a voluntary basis by the users. I do not think we can expect to see that model to be suitable for the entirety of science and technology. Moreover, it is my understanding that Sheldon Hackney, director of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), is beginning to look systematically at how NEH should organize itself with respect to the electronic environment. There may be a similar inroads to be made there as well, and that leads to questions about how we should look at NEH and try to bring them along.
The federal science agencies and perhaps the national academies should also continue their deliberations about what the STI Task Force called the "emergent model," in which virtually the entire scientific research process is conducted in an electronic environment.
One question that came up at the AAU meeting was, "What is the rate of change that we can expect?" Richard West said we will have an environment that includes a modernized library as well as an emergent library for some time to come--20 to 40 years. A number of people at that meeting gasped and said, "We are only five years or less away from having the technology to do it." I believe that overlooks the importance of other changes that must concomitantly take place for success: changes in faculty culture, in copyright for intellectual property, and in the sense of faculty and students relying on access models as opposed to an acquisition model. My sense of the matter is that the 20-year outline is still rather optimistic. We need to remember that it will take time and it will be expensive during this transitional period.
Let me close by thanking all the participants--many of whom are in this room--on the various task forces, and by thanking the ARL and the AAU staff for their very strong support of the project. I am enthusiastic about us going forward. The train is already leaving the station, obviously. It is our job to not merely get on board but make sure that we are the locomotive. Thank you.
*MR. BERDAHL: *The task that we have, both as discussants and as representatives of universities, is almost hopeless in the sense that it is so broad, and it is so difficult to begin a brief discussion to comprehend all of the aspects of it.
I begin by saying, first of all, that I believe this discussion is an essential one for us to start. It is a crucial change that we are embarking upon and one that I am very supportive of, although I myself have to say that I am an illiterate when it comes to computers.
In the last analysis it seems to me--coming at this issue from the standpoint of a university administrator--the problems are ultimately going to evolve around a very fundamental change in the cultures of universities, the perceptions of faculty, the kinds of values that we have cherished and that have been a part of university culture and are very deep. I do not have to tell those of you who have worked in universities all your lives, how difficult it is to initiate change within a university. The University of Illinois, where I came from before coming to Texas, had something on the order of 35 branch libraries. This seemed to me to be a bit more than we needed. As we talked about consolidating some of these libraries, the university raised through gifts, funds, and other money about $24 million to build a new engineering library that is just being completed as we speak. I suggested that it might be good to consolidate some of the departmental libraries related to the engineering field, like physics, in that engineering library. Physics was a department in the College of Engineering. A very distinguished faculty member, who was accustomed to having the library a few steps away--and this would have involved moving a library about a block and a half away from where he was housed--said, "If that library moves I am leaving the University of Illinois."
This will require very extensive conversations with faculty. It will take real efforts to change perceptions. We have taken pride in our institutions and the size of their libraries. At Illinois we boasted about having the third largest academic library in the United States. I knew we were going to lose that position simply because of acquisition rates--how libraries counted volumes or all these other issues--but that would be a startling moment for the faculty who would feel as though suddenly we were slipping badly, even though they had one of the most magnificent collections in the world at their fingertips there. So when one thinks about how libraries are perceived by faculty, how they are used by faculty, the expectations we have about the accessibility of resources--even though obviously technology will put more resources at our fingertips--we are talking about a cultural change that will be very, very fundamental.
The culture change goes beyond that within universities because we are going to be witnessing, in this transformation of technology, a merger of functions that in most of our universities have not historically been merged: telecommunications, computer centers, and libraries. These are, at least at the University of Texas, not functions that have been terribly easily or completely married to one another. At some universities I know there has been more progress on that front than there is at others, while at other universities there has been a real lag in that kind of function. This will take structural change, and all structural change frightens and alarms faculty. There will be turf battles about areas of responsibility that will be very complicated as we get into shared collections, access to remote data banks, and all of the rest of that stuff.
I worry, too, about some of the examples that are given to us by networking today. The Internet has a lot of activity on it. There is also a lot of junk on it. I have no doubt about how that slows down, complicates, our access to information, as you have to sift through all the headings while looking for something. We have to be certain, as we build these interactive collections and collections that are remotely accessible, that some of the models that we have do not make the task harder by alarming people more about what they have to wade through in order to get at various kinds of materials.
This does not begin to mention all the areas in the culture change about the nature of publishing--what constitutes publishing, how it is evaluated. At our universities, we are going to have to change that culture as well.
The challenge for us is going to be one that requires collaboration. It is going to require collaboration on a fairly broad front. I agree with Myles that, as we develop the governing structures and the models of leadership in putting this together, they cannot be too narrow. It cannot just be the AAU and the ARL, because that leaves a lot of people away from the table and it will complicate our problem. On the other hand, it could become too inclusive. We could too have so many people at the table making these decisions on governance that the issue may never quite get resolved, or it will get resolved in a very slow fashion.
We have a huge task before us as we look at all of the implications of the these three reports: moving away from individual collections, creating a more cost-based means of publication and of distribution, and developing new ways of handling intellectual property. They all cut against the grain of the traditional values at universities. The foremost task, it seems to me, is to begin discussions immediately about what are the implications for the agencies through which we will make these changes, or what changes in and of themselves will be required. We must begin the discussion right now with our faculties about what changes in information accessibility will mean for their traditional values and how universities have thought about these things in the past. The cultural change is, in the last analysis, going to be the most challenging of any of them that we face, in my view.
MR. EKMAN: Participating in a panel with Myles Brand and Bob Berdahl, two distinguished university presidents, leads me to confess that I am neither a librarian nor a university president. The situation is a bit like the one captured in the recent New Yorker cartoon which showed a cocker spaniel seated at a computer workstation, while a beagle lounged on the floor nearby. The caption of the cartoon reads, "The really good thing about the Internet is that no one knows that you are a dog."
The absence of protection afforded by virtual reality notwithstanding, I want to add to the inventory of institution-wide perspectives that have been mentioned by Myles and Bob by describing several contextual factors that are frequently cited in our conversations at the Foundation with college and university presidents and deans; and then I want to say a few words about the specific things that the Foundation is doing along the lines suggested by the recommendations of the AAU/ARL task forces.
In our conversations with university leaders, certain themes recur. Three of these are expansive. The first is that the use of technology on campus--in instruction, in publishing and scholarly communication, and in information storage and access--will continue to grow for the foreseeable future, and in ways that are sometime not yet imagined, let alone fully developed.
The second generalization I would venture is that conversations about issues related to the introduction of technology into all aspects of campus life--will include ever wider circles of participants. Not only are university presses and university libraries beginning to talk with one another, but the conversations are just beginning to include the commercial publishers, as well. Eventually, I hope they will also include representatives of the telecommunications and entertainment industries. Only by confronting the genuine differences of perspective on these issues will we arrive at durable solutions.
A third contextual factor (to judge from our conversations with campus leaders), is that scholarship in many fields of the humanities and the social sciences continues to be pursued along interdisciplinary lines that make it very difficult--even if limitations on money and storage space were not problems--to assemble comprehensive library collections in support of that research. The lines of intellectual inquiry that scholars choose to follow these days cut across the usual categories for organizing library materials; moreover, there are few indications that the ferment in the disciplines is settling down and that new, stable rubrics for the organization of knowledge are emerging.
These three expansive considerations are accompanied by two factors that are more constraining. The first is that, without a doubt, cost containment continues to be a theme on campus and will for the foreseeable future. Every institution--large and small, public and private--is looking for ways to save money, reduce costs, and consolidate both curricular and administrative functions.
Finally, another theme--partly a consequence of the previous one--is that opportunities for inter-institutional collaboration are now especially appealing. With limited resources, colleges and universities are looking for ways to collaborate with one another in teaching, in administrative functions, and in student services. The collaborations we are hearing about include not only those among institutions with similar characteristics--colleges, for example, that belong to existing consortia--but also groups of dissimilar institutions that happen to be in close geographic proximity, and even occasionally dissimilar institutions that are more widely dispersed.
In this realm, libraries have a distinct advantage, it seems to me, because multi-institutional collection development, shared acquisition plans, and other aspects of resource-sharing are already accepted concepts, to some degree, in the library world. In some ways, research libraries are better situated to function in a world shaped by these trends than are other sectors of the academic-institutional world.
So much for the big picture. Let me say a few words about the Foundation's specific plans in the coming years. The Foundation hopes to offer support for a modest number of demonstration projects that would allow for systematic evaluation of some of the "natural experiments" based on new approaches to electronic publishing and dissemination of scholarly information that are now emerging. It's clear to us at the Foundation, as I suspect it is to all of you, that the critical challenge for colleges and universities is to choose, from among the many technical solutions that already exist, the ones that seem to offer the greatest likelihood of long-term economic feasibility. We suspect that the solutions that are considered most attractive will differ among fields and for different types of material, as well as when one takes the perspective, alternately, of an author or of a user of scholarly information.
Because our main interest is in exploring ways to test the long-term economic feasibility of various approaches to the use of new technologies, we hope eventually to identify perhaps two dozen projects that represent a range of variables--including the organizational auspices of the project (such as university presses, commercial publishers, libraries, learned societies, library service organizations, and so on). So far, it appears from our discussions that the most interesting projects are those that come from partnerships among institutions, including many of the kinds of organizations I just mentioned.
We also hope to learn something about the differences in costs when electronic approaches are used in the editing, production, distribution, and use of large-volume and small volume journals, and when a journal exists simultaneously in electronic and print forms versus when the journal exists only in electronic form. We hope that any effort to track these costs will separate capital costs from operating costs, and initial costs from recurring costs.
Of course, it would be interesting also to test the impact on patterns of use of different pricing schemes.
Although we will support these experiments with an open mind, we hope it is proven to be the case that the price of a new product or service can approximate its marginal cost. Without biasing the experiments, let me say that we also hope it turns out that pricing schemes that are simple and allow for flexible use of materials are feasible, and that it is not necessary to price electronic library services on a pay-per-use basis. After all, the nature of an academic institution is such that students and faculty members ought to be free to meander through the information resources that are available without worrying much about the meter running.
Our emphasis at the Foundation stems from our belief that it is now time to get beyond mere fascination with the latest gimmicks--the latest bells-and-whistles--and begin to act on the understanding that change in our institutions will be by substitution, not by addition. This means, of course, that colleges and universities will need to know pretty quickly whether something is good enough to justify being introduced at the expense of something else.
Finally, let me add a few words about an aspect of the Foundation's plans that is directly related to the recommendations of the AAU/ARL task force on foreign acquisitions. The Foundation has been interested in Latin America for a long time and, within the past year or so, we have been engaged in developing a plan that would advance the general goal of better access to Latin Americanist collections located throughout the Western Hemisphere. We are interested in this subject because the scholarly communities of Latin Americanists--North and South--are growing, the field is booming, there are surging undergraduate enrollments in North America and a relatively good job market for new Ph.D.'s, the publishing output in Latin America is growing and the publications are comparatively inexpensive, and there is already a good cooperative attitude among the leading North American libraries in this field. In short, this is a situation that cries out to be exploited as a case-in-point of the larger issues of the use of technologies in libraries.
We are now talking with one university about digitizing some very hard-to-find historic Caribbean newspapers. We are talking with another organization about making available electronically some early Brazilian government documents at the provincial level that are equally hard to locate. The ARL itself is talking with us about the possibility of coordinating some of these efforts and working with the North American libraries toward establishing a distributed collection of Latin Americanist materials.
Our next step will be to try to interest some of the major research libraries in Latin America in joining these efforts, eventually by linking their catalogues--and perhaps eventually some of their collections--to a hemisphere-wide effort. The advantages of multi-institutional cooperation are enormous, as you know.
In closing, I want to thank all of you for your efforts on behalf of the AAU/ARL Research Libraries Project, which represents a good beginning. It is time to move ahead, to be very practical, and to take action. No single institution can do everything, but each of our institutions can do something. You can count on us to be opportunistic--as we are trying to be in the case of the Latin Americanist collections--because we think that, in this area, it is easier to learn from the experience of actually doing something than it is from overly long periods of abstract speculation, contemplation, planning, and discussion.
We hope that other institutions will want to join in efforts to advance a new approach to library services in the electronic era. To judge from today's discussion of the AAU/ARL project, it appears that the outlook for the beginning steps is encouraging.