"We send Science around the world"
"We send Science around the world"
In this issue:
What Did You Do in the Revolution, Mommy?
Librarians, Publishers and the Internet through a Librarian's Eyes
by Margaret Rioux
Acquisitions/Systems Librarian
Marine Biological Laboratory
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library
Woods Hole, Massachusetts
We are currently in the middle of a revolution in the way we live and work: a computer and electronic communications revolution of which the Internet is a major part. This revolution is comparable to the invention of moveable type and the printing press in the fifteenth century. These statements, or ones like them, have appeared in print so many times in recent years that they have almost become cliches; and, like many other cliches, they are all true. The growth of the Internet has brought, and will continueto bring, radical changes in the way we work and do business for both librarians and publishers, especially academic/special librarians and scholarly publishers.
This article will examine from a librarian's point of view, some of the changes which have occurred, or which may occur in our professional lives. It will also look at some of the ways in which librarians and publishers can work together to help build this changing world.
Just What is the Internet?
The Internet is actually a "meta-network," a collection of institutional and regional networks all linked by interconnections to an electronic "backbone." The communications protocols which are the traffic laws of the Internet make possible a few basic services. These include electronic mail, remote login and file transfer. The meaning of electronic mail is fairly obvious. You can send mail around the world in electronic form, from one computer to another. Remote login means that you can connect to a computer clear across the world and use it (providing you have the proper permis- sions) just as if it were in the same room and the terminal on your desk were hard-wired to it. This is sometimes referred to as "telneting." File transfer is used to copy files back and forth between distant computers almost as if they were disk drives on the same computer. Gopher and World Wide Web, which are terms often heard these days, are simply ways of using file transfer, and sometimes remote login, along with the power of your local computer to organize the information resources of the Internet and bring them to your desktop without your having to know where they came from.
The Internet was actually started over twenty years ago as a project of the Department of Defense to facilitate number-crunching by scientists.1 Today the number of computer "nodes" and individual users connected to the Internet throughout the worldis several million. Traffic on the Net will continue to grow as more people get connected and discover new ways to use it in their daily activities.
How Are Librarians Currently Using the Internet?
Librarians have been using the Internet almost as long as scientists have, and in many of the same ways that other professionals in academe are using it. Librarians discovered electronic telecommuni- cations and remote computing for cataloguing, interlibrary loan and searching of online biblio- graphic databases about the same time the Internet was born. Then they discovered that remote login would allow them to search each other's online catalogues. Other uses soon followed.
Librarians are heavy users of electronic mail for collaboration on projects and personal networking. This is especially important because, in many libraries there may be only one staff member trained in a particular specialty, e.g., music cataloguing or Slavic language bibliography. Listservs, which are mailing list managers, allow librarians to ask questions of, and share answers with, a large group of colleagues from all over the world. Professional newsletters, such as Marcia Tuttle's Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues, and conference reports are often distributed or "published" using a listserv. It is an experience unique to the world of the Internet for people to attend a conference with colleagues that they know well but that they have never seen or spoken to.
The Internet is also a source of professional literature and current awareness for librarians through the use of online tables of contents and various current awareness mailings. Some of these mailings are specific to librarianship, while others deal with electronic communication in general, such as Edupage from Educom. In some cases librarians are able to find professional literature on the Internet in full text form. Some publications of the Association of Research Libraries are available in electronic format, as are many of those from the American Library Association and the Library of Congress (including information on obtaining a copyright).
By using the Internet, librarians are better able to provide services and to carry out their professional responsibilities. Librarians use the Internet to locate and download cataloguing copy for their online catalogues from bibliographic utilities like OCLC and from cooperating libraries. They consult the catalogues of other libraries as a way to answer reference questions or for cataloguing or collection development purposes. Frequently, the Internet is used to access vendor databases and services, usually book jobbers and subscription agents, for online ordering of books and sub- scriptions, verification of account status and claiming of late or missing journal issues. Some library software packages even allow the library's computer to automatically place orders for books directly with the book jobber's computer. Librarians are beginning to use the Internet for document delivery, either in the placing of orders with a supplier for documents which are faxed to the requestor, or for actual sending of the scanned document images themselves from the supplier (perhaps another library) to a computer in the requesting library using Ariel software.
Of course librarians also use the Internet to make information available as well as to receive it. World Wide Web and Gopher servers, mentioned above, are ways of providing users of the "virtual" library with reference information and links to other information sources online. The author's library has links to its online catalogue as well as access to remote bibliographic databases and "full text" electronic references. Librarians are now using the Internet rather than telephone modem access to conduct online searches for their patrons using Dialog, Epic, and other database providers.
In short, librarians are doing the things they have always done, but now they are doing more of them electronically. The Internet is extending the reach of the library and the librarian into the offices, labs, and homes of the users. It is enabling librarians to reach out for information and to patrons in new ways rather than to sit in the library waiting for people, books, and journals to come to them.
Now That We're All Using the Internet, What Happens Next?
So far, most of the ways publishers and librarians use the Internet is a simple extension of what was done previously. We are doing things faster and at longer distances, but we are still doing the same things we've always done. This is what is now in the process of changing and what the computer and communications revolution is all about. The ways in which librarians and publishers work and the forces which drive what we do are changing more rapidly or, as someone cleverly put it, "evolving at the speed of time."
The Internet makes possible faster communi- cation of articles, scientific results and other writings. It also makes possible delivery of these articles and other information directly to the patron/reader's desktop, perhaps even directly from the desktop of the author. As scientists and other academics become accustomed to visualizing and manipulating their own data and documents in their desktop computers, they want to do the same thing with the data and documents which their colleagues are producing. Scientists and other users of scientific information are no longer satisfied with a paper journal delivered to their office or library quarterly or monthly after a long pre-publication review and editing process. They are beginning to push for immediate information in an electronic format so they can read the words and then "get inside" the data and explore it themselves. They want information to come to them without asking and based on their known interests, rather than having to go to the library or scan tables of contents in order to pull out the one or two articles of interest. The new possibilities of electronic journals and information resources are starting to trigger these demands from our patrons and readers. It is now our job as publishers and librarians to determine how to meet these demands.
On our side, librarians are trying to figure out how to keep up with the increasing demand for online publications and "desktop" service while still providing access to print journals and maintaining the more traditional collections.
Many libraries are experimenting with the "library without walls" by providing access to non- traditional forms of information via various electronic gateways. Librarians are also learning how to provide access to publications and information instead of having to own them and put them on the shelves. This is a whole new way of thinking for librarians who have traditionally amassed collections of information "just in case" someone asked for it. Now they are being asked instead where and how a particular article or piece of information might be located in order to retrieve it "just in time" to meet a patron's request.
Publishers are trying to figure out how to deal with the possibilities of, and demand for, new forms of electronic publications while keeping sub- scriptions up and production costs down in order to come out ahead financially. They're starting to experiment with different models of electronic publishing and document delivery. Experiments with delivery of article pages to the end-user as bit- mapped images, such as Elsevier's TULIP, the RedSage projects, and Allen Press's cooperative relationship with the Uncover group, are examples of publishers' efforts to anticipate the directions we may be heading.
Another major issue which both publishers and librarians, as well as authors themselves, need to be prepared to deal with is that of textual integrity in an online environment. We need to develop ways to ensure that what gets received and read by the end- user/reader is what was written by the author and published by the publisher. It is all too easy to change text and data, on purpose or by accident, just as it was easy for changes to creep into the text in the pre-printing era of hand copying. The issue of ensuring the definitive "official" text may be one of the most important to be addressed as part of the computer revolution lest we lose what we accidentally gained from the print revolution in textual integrity and the concept of copyright.
An additional question is who will have respon- sibility for maintaining the archival knowledge base, as libraries have traditionally done, if everything is online, nothing is owned and all that libraries are providing is access.
All of these issues, questions, experiments, and developments will keep all of us, librarians and publishers alike, running as fast as we can to keep up during the next few years. This is both the good news and the bad news about the Internet.
How do Librarians and Publishers Get to the Future Together and in One Piece?
First, both librarians and publishers need to recognize that the information revolution is really here and that it won't go away if we ignore it. In other words, we need to face reality. Both of our professions need to find ways to move with the tide of change, instead of futilely trying to swim against the current before drowning ignominiously. We need to be brave enough to try out new models of service delivery without waiting to see whether it works.
Librarians need to try out new things like library Gophers and World Wide Web servers that deliver high quality information sources around the clock at the desktop of the user. We need to be willing to let the end-user, the library patron, have direct access to these information sources without the intervention of a librarian.
Publishers need to bravely try out new models of publishing. One possibility could be further development of the Uncover model of document delivery. Publishers could provide, via a third party agent or service, free access to tables of contents, and perhaps abstracts, in a searchable database. The person browsing the database could then pay per article for delivery of the full text. A library could put a link on its Gopher or Web server to the table of contents location, thus making it easy for readers to order the full text. Emphasis would be on speed of delivery and convenience of searching and browsing. The Electronic Newsstand2 uses a variation of this model for trade periodicals by providing contents and excerpts in order to encourage browsers to buy the paper issue at the newsstand or subscribe to the periodical.
An interested reader could subscribe to auto- matic e-mail delivery of the table of contents of each issue of an electronic journal and then be able to order particular articles in full text. Public Access Computer Systems Review, published by the University of Houston, currently uses this model. e-mail subscribers are sent the table of contents and instructions for downloading the full text of the articles from the listserv server computer via e-mail.
Another model, currently being used by Wired Magazine3, provides free online access to back issues in text only. The current issue, complete with illustrations, is only available in print. Publishers might also publish simultaneously in both print and electronic versions. Subscribers would get the print version in the mail, and the electronic "edition" would be accessed by document delivery services and libraries for bit-mapped versions of specific articles. A service or library could obtain whole electronic issues, perhaps with a site license, or could order copies of individual articles. Other models are based on publishing at the single article level instead of in periodic issues. Subscribers might receive e-mail notification as articles are published and/or automatic delivery of articles that match a pre-determined interest profile. Creative publishers can probably think of even more possibilities which need to be tried out.
Publishers not yet ready for this "great leap forward" can begin doing some small things now to get used to the idea of working electronically. Some of these will help librarians in their efforts to deal with the need for more online information. A publisher could, either alone or with other small publishers, create online catalogues of publications, including descriptions, ordering information and even information for submission of articles. This could be done using Gopher or World Wide Web servers so that librarians and others could find it using standard index services. Some publishers, mostly university presses and those publishing heavily on computer and Internet subjects, are doing this now. O'Reilly and Associates4 and MIT Press5 are examples of publishers with their own services, while the Online Bookstore6 handles a number of more traditional books for small publishers. Allen Press produces an electronic version of their Subscription Catalogue, and it is available over the Internet.
Publishers can make it easier for libraries and other customers to do business with them over the Internet. They can work to implement X.12 and other standards for electronic transfer of claims, orders, invoices, etc., so that the necessary data can be transferred electronically instead of using paper. Publishers might also consider making cataloguing records and publication pattern descriptions for their serials available where librarians could easily find them. This could be done in concert with other small publishers or through subscription agents' databases.
Most of all publishers and librarians must be willing to work together to invent the future before it is invented for us. We must see each other, not as the "enemy," but as two parts of the information delivery process. We need to be willing to talk to each other in organizations such as NASIG7 and at events such as the annual Charleston Conference on book publishing and acquisitions, which represent neutral ground and a level playing field. Publishers and librarians need to organize and brainstorm with each other to develop new uses for the Internet which will take us into the future.
The computer and information revolution is, in many ways, both the good news and the bad news of the future. It will mean exciting times as well as frustrating and bewildering times, but it certainly won't be boring for librarians or publishers. Together we can make it work for us instead of against us.
1 Paul Gilster, The Internet Navigator (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993), 14-16
2 Point your gopher to gopher.enews.com:2100, port 2100 or find it under General in the menu of United States Gophers
3 On the World Wide Web at http://www.wired.com
4 Point your gopher client at gopher.mit.edu or find it under Massachusetts in the menu of United States Gophers. MIT Press is an item on the main menu.
5 On the World Wide Web at http://marketplace.com/0/obs/obshome.html
6 North American Serials Interest Group
Now Available Over the Internet
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1995 Cooperative Subscription Catalogue
gopher—gopher.allenpress.com
The Catalogue is complete with the current ordering information and prices on more than 450 publications from around the world. To find out more about this Electronic Catalogue and possibly including your publications,
call the Catalogue Office at Allen Press, Inc.—
(800) 627-0932 or (913) 843-1235 or e-mail—spitzer@allenpress.com