Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Jinnie Y. Davis

Assistant University Librarian for Planning & Research
North Carolina State University

In the autumn of the year when the mass media discovered the information revolution, the third Association of Research Libraries/Association of American University Presses' joint symposium on Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks was held in Washington, DC, from November 13 to 15, 1993. The meeting was also made possible through the collaboration of the University of Virginia Library and the National Science Foundation. Symposium Co-chairs were Ann Okerson of ARL and Lisa Freeman, `University of Minnesota Press. Karen Marshall of the University of Virginia Library was chair for the Charlottesville session held on November 16th (see separate report on a "Day in the Village"). One-hundred sixty symposiasts, representing university presses, academic libraries, scholarly societies, and faculty, eagerly followed reports of new R&D and considered the significance and prospects of the growing cooperation between libraries and university press publishers. Excellent questions were raised, and some were even answered. Librarians and publishers found themselves in agreement on the need to understand the positions of both sides and to work together to resolve common problems.

Refining, Not Redefining

In her opening remarks, Lisa Freeman (Director, University of Minnesota Press) highlighted the leadership of ARL and AAUP for their visionary roles in seeking cooperation between academic libraries and university presses. She described the transition made by the university press directors from apprehension and confusion at the first Symposium in 1991, to their bolder posture at the current one, with presses ready to assume responsibility as full-fledged partners in the electronic world. Leadership is, she believes, the most important role the university presses can play in scholarly communication. Both libraries and university presses have a role in the current phase of refining -- and not redefining -- the issues.

The Library As Mind

Kaye Gapen (Library Director, Case Western Reserve University) demonstrated that the electronic learning environment is already a reality and her campus community is thinking, communicating, teaching, and researching differently. Digitization is the first necessary step for the electronic interchange of information; at CWRU it has been put to use as the beginning of a "knowledge management" environment. With a far-seeing university president and multi-million-dollar support, CWRU has installed a fiber-optic network throughout the campus. The library has applied Robert Taylor's "value-added model" as a planning and evaluation tool to identify where to shift budgetary support to provide more quality, adaptability, and savings in time and cost. It also interviewed 1,400 campus personnel to design a new system and develop the "virtual library" in which libraries are not information centers; rather, they bring people together with information in an integrated system of textual and image databases and provide them with online tools to build, maintain, and share databases. Infrastructures are changing to respond flexibly to shifting patterns of teaching and learning. New control mechanisms are also being sought: CWRU is working with IBM to develop Royalty Manager software that helps track intellectual property rights. With two electronic classrooms and two centers for digitization, the library has expanded its role as information provider. No longer only "the library as place," Gapen visualizes "the library as mind."

The Virtual Library As Fantasy

James O'Donnell (Professor of Classics, University of Pennsylvania) traced origins of the term "virtual library" -- the fantasy of totality and readiness of access in existence since the days of the Alexandrian Library. While that ideal has never been realized, its utility lies in offering compass bearings for a short time. For centuries, it has been assumed that an author's works are fixed artifacts, the same wherever they may be found, and that the author can dictate worldwide use. In the networked, electronic environment, a variety of points of view exist on a single topic, producing not a single truth, but a complex, nuanced sense of what the truth may be. In the long term, a "book" cannot remain fixed but will live and be modified -- an idea unsettling to social institutions. O'Donnell likened the current situation to that of Western society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the use of printing was denounced by critics concerned about the disappearance of the existing social order. He urged participants to strike a balance, to know when to use the "virtual model" as a guide and when to let go, and to be resourceful and creative to develop new kinds of cyberspace.

Do We Have the Vision?

Science-fiction author Bruce Sterling keynoted the Symposium with a speech in which he termed the electronic environment the "fastest technological transformation in human history." He cited Prodigy, with its proprietary, revenue-generating philosophy, as a prime example of how not to do networking. The network is a living thing which, like language, encourages people to communicate. Sterling conjured the specter of "Disney Bells" -- the alarming intrusion of the telecommunications and entertainment industries into the network. As for who should run the networks, his choice is librarians, who know where to put things, where they make sense; or universities, which have a set of values. After all, he mused, the academy was once Plato's user's group under an olive tree. Sterling concluded by observing that every ancient Greek text can now fit on a CD-ROM. Our civilization is fragile, but, with little effort, we can make sure that the human race never loses another word of the ancient Greeks. Such enterprise deserves the name of greatness, provided we have the vision.

What's To Be Done?

In a session devoted to the scholarly uses of technology, Eugene Vance (Professor of Humanities, University of Washington) compared today's world with the medieval one: a revival of fundamentalism in religions, holy wars, re-negotiation of gender models, and the culture of the book. Despite the continuing validity of medieval studies, funding cuts at university presses have led to their rejection of meritorious specialized works that do not sell well. For scholars, the crucial question is "What's to be done?"

Electronic Beowulf

A panel of medievalists then explored this question, beginning with Kevin Kiernan (Professor of English, University of Kentucky), with the first public announcement of the "Electronic Beowulf" project. By digitizing its manuscripts and applying special recovery techniques, the British Library will provide electronic access to priceless manuscripts in its collection. Through special lighting and enhancements, manuscripts that were damaged or erased in the original now come to view with startling clarity, opening up the way for new identifications and interpretations of text, as well as insight into the psychology of scribes. Kiernan warned, however, that these new techniques also easily lead to the possibility of electronic forgery.

Electronic Chaucer

Mary Wack (Professor of English, Washington State University) demonstrated her exciting prototype of an "Electronic Chaucer," which links a wide array of color image archives with associated text files. Spurred by the inadequacies of traditional methods of teaching Chaucer, Wack linked a text searching and concordance program with the resources of the Oxford English Dictionary, MLA Bibliography, and Art Index to engage her students with a tool used interactively. Moreover, student assignments can result in portfolios of information that can then be added to the database. Despite its rousing success as a pedagogical tool, the project cannot be made publicly available because of copyright restrictions and software licensing issues. Wack believes, however, that the pressure of rising expectations will create changes -- the market is there.

No Way Around the Need to Choose

Michael Fuller (Associate Professor of Chinese Thought, University of California at Irvine) drew an analogy between the current situation and that of China in 1200 A.D. With block printing supported by both the government and a thriving commercial printing and distribution industry, China had access to almost all of its textual legacy and faced similar problems of the organization of "infoglut." The meritocracy arising in the Song Dynasty led to a time of heady intellectual egalitarianism based on the ready availability of all texts. It also led, however, to partisan wrangling based on different interpretations of the past: the faction with the most compelling version of the past could claim it, and claim understanding of the present and of the future. The turmoil ended with the establishment by Zhu Xi of a coherent orthodoxy out of the previous cacophony. In doing so, however, Zhu Xi elevated some texts and suppressed others, forming a new framework within which Chinese literature evolved for the next 700 years; only now are scholars realizing what has been lost. In the electronic age, we are similarly faced with the need to select texts with some priority because of the constraints of time and resources. There is no way around the need to choose -- but by selecting, we are also suppressing. We must, therefore, reject a process that hides the selections being made.

Gatekeeper to a Garden of Earthly Delights

David Seaman (Coordinator, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library) described the Library's Electronic Text Center. It offers not only the text themselves, but also scanners and software that compares text and generates word lists. The electronic library contains thousands of full-text documents in the humanities, arranged by language and type of resource (electronic or not). Although most commercial databases in the humanities are already encoded with SGML, library staff has also encoded many additional, commercially unavailable texts in the public domain, to expand holdings. Seaman described UVA's philosophy as one of "if you build it, they will come": humanists have been involved in the project since its inception and are finding far more teaching uses for the system than they had imagined. It has also drawn library staff into new collaborative roles with the faculty.

The Gods Walk the Earth

Joseph J. Esposito (President, Encyclopaedia Britannica Publishing Group) updated the status of the electronic version of the Encyclopeadia, in an environment he characterizes as "entirely destabilized, . . . the gods walk the earth, and mere mortals must stay out of the way or be crushed underfoot." By next fall, EB Online will be available on campus terminals, in text form only. Survey results showed that academics were prepared to wait for graphics but wanted to have online text immediately; the level of sophistication in academia was far beyond what EB imagined. Although Esposito said at last year's symposium that he did not see a role for the Internet in this project, the prohibitive cost of installing the database at individual local sites led EB to the Internet, which allows them to develop the product once, then sell subscriptions to colleges with access. EB sees this as an opportunity to drive the prices for information down and pass the savings along to clients. Another fundamental change is that, for the first time, the EB will no longer be a literary artifact but a knowledge base taking an actual form whenever a particular marketing application arises, a notion unsettling to some board members and sales personnel. EB is also working on the application of artificial intelligence to experiment with neural network software, leading to questions of what these changes in the medium mean for knowledge itself.

Lasting Investment in Content

Michael Ester (President, Luna Imaging, Inc.) described the Getty Art History Project, which is studying how art historians, curators, catalogers, and other professionals use images in their work today to ensure the development of a usable product that can transform manual activities in the electronic environment. Survey and interview results revealed a range of issues, including the need to display works of art in physical juxtaposition in a way that makes it possible to compare their actual scale; the unexpected finding that colors accurate in a smaller size seem wrong when magnified on a large monitor; the desire to place a work of art in its actual context or location; and changing needs in terms of reproduction quantity and quality, depending on the particular phase of research. Ester considers much of today's multimedia still "uni-media," that is, the user is not searching through more resources, just through a database to which video or audio clips have been attached. Despite rich navigational aids in the online environment, the user has no intuitive sense, as with a physical volume, of how much information is available in a database. In his new position with Luna Imaging, Ester is committed to the production of archival-quality images; although the technology will change, the content needs lasting investment.

Wisdom, Not Information

Colin Day (Director, University of Michigan Press and current President of the AAUP) focused on appropriateness of market solutions to the problems of academic publishing. Day sees librarians and university press publishers as intermediaries whose work saves the time of the reader and adds value to public goods. These public goods, however, are inadequately supplied. They are non-exhaustible and non-excludable, leading to a situation in which some documents that should be published are not. As an alternative organizational structure, Day proposes "mutualization." That is, if university presses, librarians, and faculty recognize that they are part of the same organization, they can work together to address current problems such as publishers' worries about cost recovery and librarians' concerns about increasing prices. Day observed that the term "information" distorts the subject and leads to unhelpful models; he suggested the use of the word "wisdom" instead. He urged participants never to lose sight of the major issue -- the freedom of ideas, and the sustenance and transmission of our culture.

Creating a Culture of Lifelong Learners

Despite the title of his talk, "Security, Authoritative Versions & Privacy", Michael Jensen (Electronic Media Manager, University of Nebraska Press) took the stance that heavy-duty protection in the electronic network may be unnecessary. Limitations by user or machine make it difficult to obtain information and can lead to the view that educational information is a commodity to be consumed and jealously guarded. Rather, those in the not-for-profit sector should shift assumptions and view the interconnectivity of the network as its strength, allowing a mixture of people and ideas that fosters curiosity, discovery, and investigation. The new medium offers the possibility to rethink the traditional process of publishing, with its ideas of exclusive ownership and sales of a "unit." A potential model might be like a web in which renting transactions are more prevalent than sales. If service comes first, the role of university presses is to provide the best information in the most integrated fashion. A consortial effort on the part of university presses is needed to begin serious discussion of models of free interconnectivity that still retain peer-reviewed quality and allow cost-recovery via other means such as multiple repackaging for users. The focus must be on the primary goal of service to the community.

A Northwest Passage to the Intellectual World

David Blair (Associate Professor of Computer and Information Systems, University of Michigan) addressed the issue of intellectual access on the networks. Sheer size poses enormous difficulties in both physical and intellectual access, given the coarseness of the tools now available. He suggests that effective searching tools must be able to describe accurately the intellectual content of the information they represent, to distinguish content from that of similar but different items, and to retrieve a small enough number of items that the user can examine them without reaching a "futility point." The key to intellectual access on a large text-retrieval system is through the description of intellectual content and the precise delineation of a partition, or a definable region in search space. Publishers should help by describing the kinds of materials they publish and defining clearly their publishing policies. It will not be easy to improve intellectual access, but it is necessary; a "Northwest Passage," like the geographical one, may be a vision, but it will improve our lives.

Getting through the Fire Walls

John Regazzi (President, EI Inc.) demonstrated the Engineering Information Reference Desk project. EI produces indexing and abstracting works such as Engineering Index and Compendex Plus. Although EI produces CD-ROMs, research libraries had been asking for broader accessibility particularly to EI's vast collection of journal and conference literature whose richness and value is currently unavailable to users because of the prohibitive cost of attempting to abstract it. The EI Reference Desk attempts to organize this previously unindexed literature and make it accessible through the Internet. Its three applications are: EI Page One (a tool to browse through the table of contents of EI reference works), EI Order (an electronic ordering tool), and EIView (to receive data over the Internet and print it). For libraries, a feature to be added next year is the ability to link local holdings to this database. Problems encountered include the need to get through "fire walls" (built-in protection for data moving in and out of an organization via the Internet) and the need to accommodate in system design the vagaries of the actual work habits of their users.

Our Future is Interlocked

Peter Givler's (Director, Ohio State University Press) fundamental premise is that copyright issues affect everyone and the best hope of solving the problems is for librarians, scholars, and publishers to work together. Givler explained that copyright protects forms of expression -- not ideas or facts themselves, but ways to communicate something whose reality is independent of form. To many academics, copyright seems to be a morally questionable restriction that runs counter to the ideal of university life in which scholars are dedicated to a search for truth. Moreover, it pits the rights of publishers and authors against the rights of libraries and users. It is, however, still the law of the land and grants a monopoly on information to copyright-holders. As the cost of information has risen more quickly than inflation or library budgets, librarians and patrons have become locked in a struggle to free themselves from this monopoly. Givler places the blame not on the copyright law itself, but on those who abuse it. He considers copyright a law that recognizes ownership by creative people of work they create, while providing a flexible legal framework for dissemination of the work. The system works because, by establishing ownership, copyright permits the publisher a reasonable chance of recovering costs of publication. Givler warned that, with unregulated dissemination, university presses will be out of the business of scholarly communication. The university community should explore promising avenues for resolution -- for example, by designing special licenses for specific purposes -- such as blanket licenses for a group of electronic journals -- that balance the rights of publishers, users, and libraries. Givler called for university presses and libraries to work together to find solutions to this intractable problem. We are all part of the same institutions and share the same goals; our future is interlocked.

Non-Profit Publishers Are Suffering

Janet Fisher (Associate Director for Journals Publishing, MIT Press) warned that the movement led by libraries to encourage authors to limit rights to commercial publishers is hurting the non-profit publishers as well and has the potential to destroy the system of scholarly communication built up over the years. In the electronic environment, serious problems arise with regard to the loss of access to information. Fisher focused on an explanation of how the licensing of subsidiary rights in a journal environment works and outlined the responsibilities of the press in this area. When authors transfer rights to the publisher, the publisher gives authors the right to reuse their own materials and, in addition, handles copyright registration, depository copies, questions from photocopy shops, reprints, translations, audio versions, and publications by secondary publishers, including the increasingly important arenas of CD-ROMs and online databases. Fisher believes that it is critical for publishers to be able to handle all these matters coherently. Without such centralization of ownership and the permissions process, the negotiation of contracts for each work would be an extremely time-consuming process that authors will not wish to handle for themselves. Publishers also fulfill an important role as a focal point for determining the content of a journal; without publishers, the availability of products to secondary publishers would be time-delayed and more expensive because of the need to consider each article individually and to negotiate rights for each with the author or institution. There is, however, room for compromise. When authors wish to retain copyright, the publisher should have other options available to license subsidiary rights that would not deter dissemination. Other possibilities include allowing authors to copy articles for use in their own classrooms or to shorten the length of time needed for exclusive rights, particularly in the electronic environment. Publishers should also do a better job of explaining to authors what the purpose of subsidiary rights, including the benefits for authors and the scholarly community. Fisher warned that current calls by librarians for a more aggressive stance on fair use will affect librarians in the end, as well as hurting nonprofit publishers more than commercial publishers. She called for university presses and libraries to work together to develop desperately needed guidelines for fair use in the rapidly developing electronic environment.

Getting Our Acts Together

Isabella Hinds (Manager of Professional Relations, Copyright Clearance Center) noted that the copyright law has tolerated changes over the years; the question is not whether copyright is reasonable, but whether those charged with carrying it out are reasonable. Her talk focused on blanket collective licenses and how they can further scholarly communication. The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) is a non-profit organization established fifteen years ago by a consortium of publishers, authors, and users as a clearing- house to facilitate the exchange of rights and royalties. Legally, it serves as an agent for about 8,600 publishers worldwide. The CCC ensures the end user access to a large body of material, and distributes millions of dollars in royalties each year. It has experimented with collective licenses at six universities, whereby they pay an annual fee for the CCC to offer a repertoire of publications for their use. Hinds believes that collective licensing can give both the institution and the end user access to a constantly expanding body of literature, while ensuring the protection of copyright interests of authors and publishers. The electronic future will outpace our ability to define and measure ways of use; collective licenses hedge against these bets; a good collective license will also cover fair use. Hinds warned against setting up an overly complicated process that costs more than it is worth and will not prevent abuses. She urged all sides to get their acts together and to agree on a statement of their concerns, before negotiating with other stakeholder groups. A consensus is needed on how to solve existing problems, and Hinds concluded, "Don't let the lawyers solve it for us."

Why Are There Still Lines at the Teller Windows?

David Hoekema (Dean, Calvin College) reviewed the needs of scholars and what the computer can provide for them. According to Hoekema, scholars are a very traditional group of people who just want to do more effectively what they are doing now; the computer allows them to discover new working methods that can save their time. A possible change in the patterns of scholarship may result. For example, browsing among the bookshelves may be replaced by browsing among a gopher's electronic shelves, leading to different paths of discovery. As for librarians, Hoekema believes that, while routine help may be handled by machines, there will still be a need for the interpretive, evaluative, guidance skills of library professionals; patrons will still line up at the teller windows because not every transaction can be handled by the machine.

A final panel of reactors shared their insights with symposium participants. Georgia Harper (Counsel, University of Texas System) encouraged attendees to free their minds from old constructs and think in new ways to resolve problems by working together. We have the possibility, she noted, to make an evolutionary jump. Duane Webster (Executive Director, ARL) described two recent events that attest to current commitment to resolve problems: the creation of the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable to ensure a public voice in the emerging national information infrastructure, and the establishment of the National Information Infrastructure Working Group on Intellectual Property. ARL and other organizations will have an opportunity to present the library point of view at a public hearing. Mary Coleman (Yale University Press) noted the resistance to technology felt by many university press representatives at the first symposium. Now, she feels a greater level of comfort with the lingo, a great deal of progress on gopher-based projects, and a willingness to find ways to make information available to people. Bruce Barton (University of Chicago Press) also contrasted the first symposium and the current one: at the former, university presses were overwhelmed by large-scale projects such as OCLC's journal Online Clinical Trials and unsure if they could enter the electronic marketplace. Now, electronic publishing is being integrated into the mainstream; there are sophisticated products within the grasp of university presses. The challenge in the next ten years is to guarantee access to electronic products.

The topical panels were spiced by a number of brief project demonstrations including an interactive Supreme Court demo (Jeff Goldman, Northwestern University), Encyclopaedia Britannica Fact Checker (Doug Paul, EB), electronic journals projects (Scott Bennett, Johns Hopkins University and Rebecca Simon, University of California Press), Project Janus (Kent McKeever, Columbia University Law Library), National Museum of American Art Online (Steve Dietz), the North Carolina Reference Collection (David Perry, UNC Press), Stanford's participation in the DARPA technical reports project (Vicky Reich), and Chuck Creesy of Princeton University Press on the development of university press Internet catalogs via gopher access.

[ED. Note: Notes from Lisa Bayer, Penn State University Press and Ann Okerson, ARL, were incorporated into this summary.]