The electronic library has been a vision desired by many--and rejected by
some--since Vannevar Bush coined the term memex to describe an automated,
intelligent, personal information system. Variations on this vision have
included Ted Nelson's Xanadau, Alan Kay's Dynabook, and Lancaster's
"paperless library," with the most recent incarnation being the
"Knowledge Navigator" described by John Scully of Apple. But the reality
of library service has been less visionary and the leap to the electronic
library has eluded universities, publishers, and information technology
files.
The Memex Research Institute (MemRI), an independent, nonprofit research
and development organization, has created an Electronic Library Program
of shared research and development in order to make the collective vision
more concrete. The program is working toward the creation of large,
indexed publicly available electronic image collections of published
documents in academic, special, and public libraries. This strategic
plan is the result of the first stage of the program, which has been an
investigation of the information technologies available to support such
an effort, the economic parameters of electronic service compared to
traditional library operations, and the business and political factors
affecting the shift from print distribution to electronic networked
access.
The strategic plan envisions a combination of publicly searchable access
databases, image (and text) document collections stored on network "file
servers," local and remote network access, and an intellectual property
management-control system. This combination of technology and
information content is defined in this plan as an E-library or E-library
collection. Some participating sponsors are already developing projects
based on MemRI's recommended directions.
The E-library strategy projected in this plan is a visionary one that can
enable major changes and improvements in academic, public, and special
library service. This vision is, though, one that can be realized with
today's technology. At the same time, it will challenge the political
and social structure within which libraries operate: in academic
libraries, the traditional emphasis on local collections, extending to
accreditation issues; in public libraries, the potential of electronic
branch and central libraries fully available to the public; and for
special libraries, new opportunities for shared collections and networks.
The environment in which this strategic plan has been developed is, at
the moment, dominated by a sense of library limits. The continued
expansion and rapid growth of local academic library collections is now
clearly at an end. Corporate libraries, and even law libraries, are
faced with operating within a difficult economic climate, as well as with
very active competition from commercial information sources. For
example, public libraries may be seen as a desirable but not critical
municipal service in a time when the budgets of safety and health
agencies are being cut back.
Further, libraries in general have a very high labor-to-cost ratio in
their budgets, and labor costs are still increasing, notwithstanding
automation investments. It is difficult for libraries to obtain capital,
startup, or seed funding for innovative activities, and those
technology-intensive initiatives that offer the potential of decreased
labor costs can provoke the opposition of library staff.
However, libraries have achieved some considerable successes in the past
two decades by improving both their service and their credibility within
their organizations--and these positive changes have been accomplished
mostly with judicious use of information technologies. The advances in
computing and information technology have been well-chronicled: the
continuing precipitous drop in computing costs, the growth of the
Internet and private networks, and the explosive increase in publicly
available information databases.
For example, OCLC has become one of the largest computer network
organizations in the world by creating a cooperative cataloging network
of more than 6,000 libraries worldwide. On-line public access catalogs
now serve millions of users on more than 50,000 dedicated terminals in
the United States alone. The University of California MELVYL on-line
catalog system has now expanded into an index database reference service
and supports more than six million searches a year. And, libraries have
become the largest group of customers of CD-ROM publishing technology;
more than 30,000 optical media publications such as those offered by
InfoTrac and Silver Platter are subscribed to by U.S. libraries.
This march of technology continues and in the next decade will result in
further innovations that are extremely difficult to predict. What is
clear is that libraries can now go beyond automation of their order files
and catalogs to automation of their collections themselves--and it is
possible to circumvent the fiscal limitations that appear to obtain
today.
This Electronic Library Strategic Plan recommends a paradigm shift in
library service, and demonstrates the steps necessary to provide improved
library services with limited capacities and operating investments.