Cooperation and the national networks

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John Beard showed that local cooperation has been a feature of life for many years, although FD3 (the USC report on the future development of libraries) has ...
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Cooperation and the future of

national networks DEREKLAW

When I was invited to give this paper I was asked to give a free-ranging and open-ended round-up drawing together the themes of cooperation as expressed in the earlier papers. That is of course a little difficult since, like you, I only heard the last two this morning. However, rather than sounding like one of those judges awarding marks for performance in the music festivals I used to attend as a child, I thought I would prefer to construct a paper around the three key words or phrases of 'future', 'cooperation' and 'national networks', and to fit comments on the preceding papers around these, even if it makes things sound a little disjointed and repetitive in places. So, first, to cover the future I shall use the LIB2 report which identified a number of trends in library automation and I'd like to look at them. Secondly, you may have noticed that the word 'library' does not feature in the title of any of the papers you have heard,· although it featured extensively in their content, so I'd like to look at the growth of national networks in which libraries are not involved, but which have everything to do with the future of informationprovision. Trying to draw together some of the themes from the preceding papers will cover cooperation, and I then hope to draw all three strands together. The LIB2 Report was prepared last year by the Library Association and the Library Technology Centre for the EEC and is more formally called 'State of the Art of the Applications of New Information Technologies in Libraries and their Impact on Library Functions in the United Kingdom'.1 It is an excellent report, although with a title like that it is hardly

surprising that it is contracted to LIB2 in normal usage. ]t indulged in a little fairly safe but none the less useful speculation on the future. The authors identified seven areas of future development and I shall look at each of these in turn, since they all have some potential relevance to the theme 0 this seminar. They were: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

consolidation of the present generation of library systems; the growth of networking facilities; broad band networks permitting the exploitation of mixed media; the emergence of OPACs (online public access catalogues); exploring the potential of CD-ROM (compact disc-read only memory); the growth of multi-user micro-systems in small libraries; a greater integration of the information industry.

The first of these themes then is 'a consolidation of thl current generation of integrated library systems with marc' sophisticated interaction between the functional softwar modules'. This seems to me undeniably trile but just a littll worrying, for in our pursuit of ever-more sophisticated, ev'r more baroque systems aimed at ever-more efficient librari. , we lose sight of the fact that we have to develop informatioll .services to meet the needs of our users. There is a sense III which there is not a single automated library in the couotr There are many mechanized libraries and Chris Leamy talk .1 of mechanized national bibliographies, but despite tJH millions of pounds spent on systems in the last decade, 111 ' reader still has to come to the library for a book; still has 11' look up a catalogue, albeit on a screen rather than a eaI'll, but possibly still in a catalogue hall; still has to go to III issue desk and perhaps queue to check out a book; when Iht book is overdue the reader still receives a piece of mail 11'111 has to come back to the library to renew the book or pa 1 fine. We have created some very fine systems over the p \' t twenty years to do all of these things very efficiently llild many of the papers you have heard have given insights illlll

that strand of development and how it is still progressing. John Beard showed that local cooperation has been a feature of life for many years, although FD3 (the USC report on the future development of libraries) has undoubtedly' gi~en it a new impetus. J remain an agnostic on the local plans, if only because I fully share Beard's view of the need to put effort into service delivery not systems management, and the plans, no matter !Iow worthy, seem to pu t the stress on sy~tems management. However, although Beard stressed ~e prnna')' of delivering a service, the sense that I get from hIS paper !5 at effort is being directed at finding existing best pr~ctIce 10 each area of cooperation and adopting it as some kmd of standard or target. As Chris Leamy said in answer to a question, the aim appears to be consolidation rather ~an ,the creation of anything new - and who can blame librarIa.ns when faced with all the pressures Beard described? This same message seemed to be coming from Leamy albeit on a wider national and European scale. He talked of efficieno/ and savings, of performance measures and equipme~lt dIscount~. The European Library Cooperation Plan whIch he descrIbed had in its Action Lines a sort of ritual genu~ec~ion towards innovative IT, but rests, or appears to, on linkm,g. catalogues and on con,spectus, which can be crudely cancatured as saying that we're going to have biggerc~~alogues and, count how many books we have. ,Hardly VISIonarystuff, If typical of the EEC. .The E,ur?pean dimension is a fascinating one, if only because It IS thought that the EEC and/or the Council of ~urope has a potential wall of money ready to throw at lIbrary l?roblems. ~hat I find unsettling is the way in which other DIrectorates ill the EEC appear to be spending all sorts of .money on what may loosely be termed information delivery systems. T~ey are not particularly advanced systems, but ~ey are. well m adv~ce of the European Library CooperatIOn Plan and are aImed at the business and industrial marketplace, apparently cutting out publicly-funded libraries. The essence of all that Learny and Beard describe is that our fu~u~e continues to lie in speeding. up and cheapening our eXIStmg roles ~d hoping that somewhere along the line we can scrape up a lIttle money for new initiatives.

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· In my view, true automation implies a completely fresh approach. It implies takirig advantage of opportunities so that the reader can do everything from having texts delivered at the office in machine-readable form to paying fines or charges by electronic transfer from a bank account. For the last twenty years, libraries have had an introverted concern with administrative constraints and have planned systems and cooperated on the basis of notions of efficiency and economy. As Brenda Moon ably considers in an article in the first issue of the British Journal of Academic Librarianship,2 perhaps it is now time to ignore our libraries and begin to explore the developing information needs of our users, before the>: are met in other ways and by other people. In our rather mward-Iooking world it is easy to forget that we, and where they exist our computer centres, have no monopoly of automation and that developments in other fields may be creating competitors for the role of informationprovider. But there is hope. Never let it be forgotten that the commercial marketplace is often crass. After all, its reaction to high-quality computer graphics was to put Playboy online, presumably to ensure that the VDU really did make you go blind. The second point made in the LIB2 Report is that there will be a growth in networking facilities 'in which libraries will require dial-up access, faster data transfer, gateway facilities, more sophisticated LANs (local area networks), v~lue-added s~rvices,. and OSI (open systems interconnectIOn), all lead~ng to mtegrated information systems'. Again, there can be little quarrel with this prediction, although I do ~ot think ~here is a?y inevitability about the development of mtegr~ted I~formatIOn systems. They will require a great deal of pIOneerIng work. Developments in communications tec~nology ~ill be t?e bedrock on which the next generation of mformatIOn servIces, the sunrise services, will be built. Dial-up will. soon disappear as services are called up from des~-top .mIcros and only finance will dictate the pace at whIch thIS happens. I also take the view that worries about that finance are grossly over-rated. My own library makes no ch~ges for online searching and tries to make it fairly freely avaIlable to research staff. Despite this, the cost of such use

runs at under 'n per cent of the armual budget, while the cost of a ten or twenty megabyte hard disk IBM-eompatible micro is about the same as we raise in photocopying revenue every three weeks. Data transfer is more of a problem, since it seems to be a constant source of astonishment to computer managers that anyone possesses a single file of more than a couple of megabytes, far less wants to transfer it to another part of the country. The growth in line speeds is encouraging and will no doubt continue, but it still depresses me that the technical manager of the Research Libraries Group finds that the most efficient way to transfer a catalogue update from San Francisco to New York is by putting a magnetic tape on a Boeing 747. Gateway facilities are beginning to grow and will soon mushroom as we get to grips with communications technology. Most of us have Been familiar, perhaps unwittingly, with the PSS (Packet Switched Service) to IPSS (International PSS) gateway for some time and are now beginning to become familiar with the JANET (Joint Academic NETwork) to PSS gateway. Mike Wells mentioned links to EARN (European Academic Research Network) and ARP ANET and even more exotic networks like SABINET and ZIMNET have possible uses, but there has been no serious exploration of these by libraries as yet. I suspect that we will see the typical bell curve of growth here. It is extremely encouraging to have had Professor Wells here talking to us. He has been a staunch supporter of the involvement of libraries in networking and had a large hand in ensuring that the very active J ANET Library Users Group was set up. There seem two areas for growth here. First, we may expect a growth based on housekeeping data, the obvious areas being acquisitions and interlibrary loans, variants of the sort of system described by Robin Yeates. However, we may also expect an increasing interest in the holding of and gaining access to very large datasets which cannot sensibly be replicated in every institution. It then seems likely to me that once people have the capacity to transfer that part of the dataset relevant to their needs they will do so. I have always been able to date exactly when computing arrived properly in UK libraries. It was in 1969 when I was at

library school and for the first time an opti~n of aut