President
Commission on Preservation and Access
Before I attempt to summarize the elements of the conference that seemed most significant to me, I want to thank Richard Ekman, Richard Quandt, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for having brought this group together. They could have asked all the speakers to submit htrnl versions of their papers, and then made them available on a Web site and created a special listserv to carry on our discussions. But that would have been to lose what was most useful about the past two days -- the opportunity to discuss ideas face to face. Hal Varian, in his after-lunch talk, pointed out that attention is the scarce resource today. By convening this group, the Mellon Foundation allowed us to concentrate our collective attention on the important topic of scholarly communication.
Three of us have been asked to bring our individual perspectives to summarizing a conference that was crowded with excellent speakers. I offer my comments from the perspective of a librarian.
I believe that all the speakers shared at least one major assumption: that the purposes of the library will remain unchanged, though the means through which it achieves those purposes may be quite new and different. The library still exists to provide whatever resources are necessary to meet the research and inquiry needs of students and faculty members. At the same time, the library as a physical place still serves as a community symbol of knowledge and its importance to society.
Against the backdrop of this shared assumption, we heard speakers with at least three different perspectives: 1) technology enthusiasts, who see how technology can change the essential nature of our work and who urge all of us to accelerate the pace of transformation; 2) librarians, who are concerned about managing "hybrid" organizations, which will support massive paper-based collections while also taking full advantage of electronic resources; and 3) publishers, who want to understand how electronic scholarly communication will affect the publishing business.
In all the talks, the speakers eloquently portrayed the promise of technology for increasing access to information. Far less clear were answers to the following questions:
Can technology reduce the cost of scholarly communication?
Do students learn better when using technology?
Are libraries organized to take full advantage of the possibilities for enhanced access?
I found the questions raised by the speakers more compelling than their reports of progress, perhaps because so many of the projects they discussed are not far enough advanced to offer solid conclusions. I would summarize these questions, which came up in many different guises, as follows:
Where should we concentrate our efforts -- on converting print documents to digital form to increase access, or on adding digital files that were born digitally to existing library resources? Can we do both?
How do we shift the focus from individual institutional holdings to the provision of more extensive access to materials for our students and scholars? How do we budget for this shift?
How can digital libraries be discussed without taking into account the networks for delivering information resources and the equipment necessary for reading digital files? Libraries have never been islands unto themselves, but there is increasing awareness of their interdependency.
What, exactly, do we want to count? How do we count? Our tradition is to collect quantitative data about the size of collections, budgets, staffs, transactions. If we keep in mind that the library's primary purpose is to provide resources for scholarship and teaching, what should we be counting in the digital environment? Thus far, only one conclusion is clear: counting "hits" on a Web site is useless.
Will we be able to read anything we are now producing in electronic form a few years from now? "Digital preservation" has been alluded to many times, but it remains an area of great uncertainty.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has taken an extremely important first step toward helping us understand the implications of scholarly communication in the digital environment by asking project directors to describe in detail the assumptions of their pilot projects and then to be candid about outcomes and users' reactions. This process needs to be continued over time as the projects mature. In the course of their development, I hope that we can learn more about the following areas:
We heard a great deal about changes we can expect, but we need to have more intense discussions about those changes we are prepared to pursue and effect. Descriptions of the various projects gave us much to ponder. We must now spend more time specifying the desirable future outcomes and conditions against which we can measure project results.
Electronic information resources alter both our notions about the significance of very large collections and our methods of allocating resources for the provision of information. How are these changed perceptions to be accommodated within higher education?
There appear to be genuinely different requirements for research resources from discipline to discipline. In describing projects, we should look carefully at the types of resources involved and the audience, or audiences, for them. It is not possible to generalize about what scholars need and want.
To date, the projects have provided considerable data about how information resources have been scanned and indexed and how they can be retrieved. In the future, we must learn more about users' reactions to the new format and about the utility of digital information to them.
Kevin Guthrie rightly pointed out that there are not technological barriers to archiving and to meeting our societal obligation to preserve the intellectual record. But now we must find the most suitable Ð and the most cost-effective Ð methods for fulfilling that obligation.
Though most of the conference speakers advocated continued support for pilot projects, many also asked that more specific requirements for reporting results be established. All praised The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for creating an environment of candor and trust for the exchange of sensitive information. The future of scholarly communication may not be clear, but the need for all of us to understand better the implications of electronic publishing is entirely evident. To that process of understanding, this conference was a most valuable contribution.