Boston, Massachusetts
May 17-19, 1995

Realizing Digital Libraries

2010-A: An Ivory Tower in Cyberspace

Government efforts to spur the development of an ubiquitous, high-performance, and affordable global information infrastructure waned in the last half of the 1990s, but the telecommunications industry has continued to make steady if uneven progress. Although the technological price/performance of server and client workstations continued to improve in step with historical trends, the complexity of configuring and operating these workstations together with the cost and complexity of network connectivity ruled in favor of most scientists and scholars gaining access to these workstations through their affiliations with or employment build the Global Research and Education Network (GREN) and to strongly re-enforce their traditional position as nearly monopoly providers of advanced research services and educational experiences.

The GREN is modeled upon the prior experience of these institutions with the global Internet, and it technically inter-operates with the Internet. Full participation in the GREN, however, requires joint ownership of the intellectual property produced by GREN member institutions as well as the sharing of costs, user support, and standards development with the GREN community. Intellectual property is used and reused within GREN member institutions according to academic rather than commercial protocols and standards. Access to intellectual property outside of GREN member institutions, and access to the intellectual property of GREN member institutions by non-members, is through specific project and partnership agreements or through a complex variety of commercial discovery, access, and use product and service offerings. The GREN is used to provide access to GREN resources and services well beyond the confines of GREN member facilities and campuses but always as the result of the direct involvement of one or more GREN member institutions.

The libraries of GREN member institutions now play a major new role in the creation, production, and distribution of new intellectual works. This role developed in step with the growth of “life-cycle” information resource management principles, policies, and practices in GREN member institutions. Libraries continued to play their historically important roles in acquisition, organization, and utilization of scholarly and scientific information, updated to reflect the fact that most of these activities are now done in an inter-institutional context among GREN members and entail the development of “locator” and “helper” network servers and services rather than the building of individual institutional collections and the direct provision of user support per se. The libraries of GREN member institutions are also deeply involved in the preservation of not only scholarly and scientific but administrative information.

2010-B: Self-Publishing is the Norm

Government efforts to stimulate the development of an ubiquitous, high-performance, and affordable Global Information Infrastructure (GII) were wildly successful in the last half of the 1990s, and the telecommunications industry has continued to make steady progress across the entire front of related technologies and markets. Access to networked resources and services is now commonplace, and such resources and services cost less than most users paid for cable television and their television sets as recently as the early 1990s. The first widespread, commercially successful applications of artificial intelligence now enable these users to configure and stretch the performance of their individual hardware and software platforms to interact with a spectacularly heterogeneous and distributed network environment.

In general, research institutions did not recover from their financial and political lows of the 1990s, and the most successful of the ones that did now concentrate almost exclusively on a relatively small number of disciplines and subject areas. Many individual scholars and scientists affiliate with specific home institutions, but many more prefer to affiliate with institutions on a project by project or a course by course basis and they engage in many such ad hoc affiliations at the same time. Most, if not all, scholars and scientists are also involved in the advanced research and educational activities and offerings of the large and still growing set of new virtual institutions and organizations that emerged in step with the growth of the GII. Student preferences and behaviors show a similar pattern, as most choose the certificated offerings of a variety of advanced educational service providers rather than the degree offerings of a single provider. The research institutions that do best in this environment are not only those that are the most focused, they are the ones that have been able to leverage their historic reputations for quality into a competitive edge against the unproven capacities and performances of a large and still growing set of alternative providers.

Research libraries have mainly suffered the fates of their parent institutions. But, many have drawn upon their long traditions of inter-library cooperation to consolidate their resources and services, and some have even merged into subject-defined consortia. Although most authors retain personal control of their intellectual property, these consortia are generally quite effective at negotiating very favorable use terms and conditions for the communities that they serve, and some consortia even function as repositories and service agencies for the disciplines and subject areas that they cover. All research libraries are intimately involved in organizing access to networked resources and services, and they routinely provide evaluative as well as descriptive information about such resources and services. They also have very active and well-respected preservation programs which they try, with uneven success, to leverage into the early deposit and management of the works of particularly well-regarded authors.

2010-C: Academic Guilds Reign Supreme

Although government efforts to spur the development of an ubiquitous, high-performance, and affordable global information infrastructure waned in the last half of the 1990s, the telecommunications industry has continued to make steady progress on providing very attractive technologies and strategies for building mission-oriented, wide-area networks. As a result, networks that serve specific, carefully defined industries and other communities of interest have proliferated. Applications housed in these networks inter-operate across network boundaries in accord with bilateral and occasionally multi-lateral agreements and partnerships. The technological price/performance of server and client workstations has continued to improve in step with historical trends, and most scholars and scientists now routinely access a rich array of networked resources and services through very powerful client workstations. However, the complexity of configuring and operating the server workstations that house those resources and provide those services, together with the strain of keeping up with the frequently changing technical requirements of connecting to and communicating with individual (set of ) networks, has ruled in favor of most servers being built and operated by organizations rather than individuals.

Scholarly and scientific societies have generally succeeded in leveraging their traditional role in assessing, recognizing, and rewarding excellence into a major new role as the key providers and operators of the network server(s) used by their members. They also usually jointly own the intellectual property they manage with the creators of that intellectual property, and many are now very actively involved in formulating and managing actual research and educational programs and their budgets. Research institutions have struggled to recover from their financial and political lows of the 1990s, and the ones that have succeeded the best now concentrate almost exclusively on the needs and capacities of a relatively clearly defined and generally proximate geographic area. Most institutions subscribe and integrate access to numerous subject-oriented networks, but they do not generally control access to the resources and services available through those networks.

Research libraries have generally followed the course of their parent institutions. On campus, these libraries manage the complex portfolio of contracts and payments that govern access to and use of the networked information resources and services provided by scholarly and scientific societies. They take a special interest in enabling and supporting access by students and across disciplines at their parent institutions. This role entails the development of access strategies and mechanisms that are tailored to interests and abilities of these individuals, who are not practitioners of particular disciplines or members of particular scholarly and scientific societies. Many research libraries have also evolved into very significant regional players in the provision of scholarly and scientific information to the full range of research and educational institutions. On a selective but very real basis, moreover, individual research libraries have formed partnerships with groups of scholarly and scientific societies to preserve the works distributed by those societies, and such libraries have frequently been able to leverage this role to the general advantage of the communities and regions that they serve. But, in general, the societies themselves have assumed responsibility for preservation.

2010-D: A Global Information Marketplace

Although government efforts to stimulate the development of an ubiquitous, high-performance, and affordable Global Information Infrastructure (GII) were very successful in the last half of the 1990s, and the telecommunications industry continued to make steady progress across the entire front of related technologies and markets, the scholarly and scientific communication and publication process has become even more concentrated into and dominated by large, commercial firms than it was before these developments. This is due in part to the high cost and complexity of configuring and operating servers capable of reliably delivering a common, very high (as compared with other GII applications) level of service to all points on the very complicated and ever changing fabric of networks that constitute the GII. It is also significantly due to the fact that commercial firms were willing and able to continue investing in networked information research and development long after the financial and other resources of government agencies, research institutions, and scholarly and scientific societies, among other non-commercial actors, had been exhausted.

In general, research institutions have not recovered from their financial and political lows of the 1990s, and most such institutions are very much smaller and more dependent on tuition revenues than they were before the onset of these difficulties. The flow of research dollars and talent from such institutions to the corporate sector that started in the 1980s and became a virtual flood in the 1990s has re-enforced the influence of commercial publishers, in strengthening both technical and legal measures for protecting intellectual property. In addition, only large, multi-national firms have the resources to understand and observe the complex local “content” and “culture” rules and regulations that many nations, and even some states in the United States, have enacted.

The programs of research libraries are carefully crafted to serve the particular interests of their parent institutions, reflecting the priority-consciousness of those institutions, but inter-library programs still extend the coverage of library budgets and the reach of library services. Research libraries are very involved in the organization of scholarly and scientific information and in the training and support of scholars and scientists, and both activities are widely recognized as essential for the cost effective acquisition and utilization of networked information in this commercialized environment. Selected commercial publishers and research libraries cooperate in the funding and operation of an consortium of facilities for preserving networked resources, but many publishers do not participate in this effort.