Vancouver, British Columbia
May 15-17, 1996
Richard Ekman, Secretary
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
PRESIDENT CLINE: Good morning. The panel which is awaiting us here this morning will provide us with some information on several works in progress. Each of these works in progress have the intent and purpose of changing scholarly communication to develop directions for integrating electronic resources in our research libraries, and to provide support so that we can investigate or explore the changing cost of meeting information needs for researchers and scholars.
I encourage you to look at these projects in light of the prospects that they may offer each of us at our respective institutions to advance our own strategic directions. Considering how these efforts provide insight will increase our understanding of the risks as well as of the opportunities, enabling us to more effectively support scholarship. We will need to think about how such efforts can be expanded and modified in order to shape the digital environment that supports research and learning.
At this point it is my pleasure to turn this morning's program over to Richard Ekman, Secretary of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
MR. EKMAN: Thank you, Nancy, and good morning.
Here, in this company, I confess to feeling that I am among the converted--that is, among people who already understand the predicament of both scholarly publishers and research libraries. This predicament is often characterized by an anxiety over rising costs, the risk that ever smaller numbers of books and journals will be produced in the future at affordable prices, and the specter of fewer outlets for the dissemination of the results of scholarly research. Here, among the converted, there is already genuine--and widespread--willingness to try electronic alternatives to traditional publishing and library operations. I suspect that we all fervently hope to find ways to contain costs, to increase access, and, in other ways, to preserve a viable system of scholarly communication.
My suspicion, however, is that most of us have been acting on the basis of intuition or blind faith more than on the basis of hard knowledge about what actually works. A number of recent, well-publicized technological innovations have intrigued us, but do we really know the answers to such questions as:
What are the initial start-up costs of electronic forms of scholarly communication?
What are the continuing costs of sustaining these innovations?
Are users willing to pay to sustain them, and at what price levels?
Will faculty members regard electronic ways of doing research as convenient?
Will faculty members regard the electronic results of scholarship done in this way as legitimate, and as good bases for judgments about promotion and tenure?
The ultimate question, I suppose, is whether those in authority on campus will be persuaded by the evidence to reallocate funds or to reorganize functions so that the promise of the new technologies can be fulfilled in an ongoing, institutionalized way?
A number of organizations have in recent years been supporting "controlled experiments" in the use of technology in scholarly communication, and they are trying to document in sufficient detail what has transpired, in the belief that skeptical colleagues will be persuaded that the alternatives are worth pursuing. The National Science Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Commission on Preservation and Access, the National Digital Library Federation, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others, all have initiatives along these lines. Yet it would not be correct to assume that external funding is the only way in which such experiments can be launched. I hear frequently about individual educational institutions that have mounted well-conceived and ambitious efforts to apply a particular technology to a specific aspect of library or publishing operations.
Our efforts at the Foundation began several years ago with an emphasis on journals, which we then regarded as the most obvious--and in many ways the simplest--format for experimenting with electronic alternatives. (We were naive about the simplicity, I can say with hindsight!) We then moved to electronic equivalents of books--both reference books and monographs--and have more recently considered projects based on other formats of scholarly information. At present, I am in active correspondence with people whose projects involve rare editions of American literature, medieval manuscripts, conference proceedings, musical scores and recordings, and art images.
The first "lessons" of these experiments are just beginning to be evident. Today, we will hear from representatives of three projects that began only a year or two ago. They will all tell you, I'm sure, that it took longer to get started than anticipated and that their "results" so far can be reported today only in the most tentative way. But the fact is that we are beginning to learn something about ongoing costs, the best pricing schemes, how electronic versions of scholarly materials are used, and who among the various constituencies of academic publishing and libraries are especially interested in using which kinds of materials. Our speakers may also venture to say something about the differences they've noticed among fields and among formats of material.
For my part, I will hazard only two tentative conclusions based on what I've seen in these and other projects. The first is that the most imaginative and successful projects are often those in which innovative collaborative arrangements are made among libraries, presses, computer centers, learned societies, and other entities. These "hybrid" organizations do seem to be better positioned to take advantage of the new technologies. My second tentative generalization is that scale matters: it is very difficult for a small organization--such as a learned society that publishes one journal--to make the big investments in equipment, marketing, and expert personnel that are necessary to begin an electronic operation.
I've asked today's speakers to try to focus their presentations on each project's initial objectives, the testable propositions that were laid out at the beginning, a description of activities to date, and a summary of tentative findings. Jim Neal will describe Johns Hopkins' Project Muse, which is concerned exclusively with journals. Carol Mandel will discuss Columbia's Online Books Evaluation Project, which is concerned with a variety of types of books. Sue Rosenblatt will speak about Project SCAN, Scholarship from California on the Net, which is concerned with both books and journals. I'm pleased that these three individuals have agreed to share their interim progress reports in such a public way, because these are three highly significant experiments in the use of technology in scholarly communication.
Following the three presentations, we will open the floor for your questions and comments.