By
Norman E. Anderson
This short essay, which has been an evolving document originating in private correspondence written years ago, is an attempt to fight through the fog faced by today's academic librarians, a fog generated by the rapid development of the computer environment. At bottom is this question: Why should academic institutions continue to invest in physical libraries, especially library facilities and book acquisitions, when the virtual library seems to be nearly upon us and, in any case, when information held at other sites can be delivered more and more expeditiously? In a more refined form, the question becomes: How should academic libraries weigh the competing values of acquisitions, access to remote information, and the virtual library? The point of the essay is to help clarify some of the issues and to begin to frame an answer to the questions raised. No more than a summary sketch is intended.
Part of the mission of the academic library is to provide access to information resources. The means of access is multiple and can be roughly divided into providing access to materials on hand and providing access to remote materials.
Acquisitions is the first step in providing access to materials on hand. In the traditional library sense of providing access to print materials (but not only print materials), acquisitions has many advantages, for instance, with regard to development of awareness, ease of use, pedagogy, research, reader services, sound scholarship, and economic fairness to students. Acquisitions in the added sense of acquiring electronic information, speaking particularly of computerized information, has the benefit of providing a relatively stable collection in a medium that is otherwise highly unstable and apt to change or vanish without notice. It can also enable customized searchability and manipulation of data.
Interlibrary loan, document delivery, and electronic transfer are some of the means of access that are oriented to remote information. Access to remote information has its own set of advantages. From the student perspective, one of the great advantages is the ability to have recourse to the entire universe of publicly available information. From the perspective of information professionals, a key advantage is resource sharing for the sake of more focused apportionment of resources.
Each means of access has a different set of disadvantages as well as advantages. The list of advantages and disadvantages of different means of access changes depending upon what is being contrasted, for instance:
In order to think clearly about the future of information access through libraries, it is important first to sort matters out and to set them in the right framework.
The physical library is highly likely to continue to play a vital role for at least the next two decades and quite possibly for the rest of the 21st century. Here are some of the reasons why that is so:
Allow me to elaborate upon just one of the above points. It is stated that the educational, scholarly, and cultural issues involved in abandoning texts in their original state are profound.
To read a 17th century edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is a far different experience from reading a cheap modern paperback reprint produced for a popular audience. The early edition conveys a replete sense of historical context and passage of time. The student, even if dipping into the early edition only briefly, is drawn from a two-dimensional into a four-dimensional reading. How much greater the difference when the book format itself is abandoned!
Certainly sound scholarship would ground itself in the original editions, not reprints oriented to a popular audience. Reliability of historical evidence is vital. Of course, the scholar may consult a microfilm copy of the original.
However, even a microfilm copy is not always adequate. A significant percentage of error crept into many microfilm projects, so that, for instance, a wrong title page might be assigned to a text or so that key portions of texts are illegible. Thus scholars will still sometimes want to consult the originals, that is, the originals in the physical sense.
The mention of microfilm leads to another aspect of the point being made. When information is moved from one medium to another, its role changes and not necessarily in predictable ways.
The classic example of an unexpected role change has to do with microfilm. The medium of microfilm was expected by many to supplant the book. After all, if a whole library of texts could be compacted into the space of a few boxes, why foot the expense of facilities for books?
Microfilm did not supplant books. Instead microfilm became the medium of, first, preservation and, second, the distribution of theses, centuries-old book titles, and aging runs of serials. For the reading public, a text in microfilm was there so that it could be "gotten at" if necessary; but a text in book format had a direct and ready interactive presence within the reading public's comfort zone.
In a similar manner, lengthy computer text files are used more for text manipulation, key word searches, and textual analysis than for continuous reading; and computer databases are used for their Boolean search capabilities, whereas the same databases in hard copy are still used for their hierarchical search capabilities. (To this day, it is still generally more effective to search for literature on passages of the Bible in hard copy indexes than in computer databases, for the simple reason that chapters and verses lend themselves far better to hierarchical searches than to key word searches.) With regard to the role of electronic texts and databases, the dust is far from settled. It is clear, however, that texts do undergo a role shift when they move from the book format to the computer format, and that the role of the book format continues to be important.
So the physical library continues to have a future, but this does not mean that electronic resources can be ignored. Quite the contrary. They cannot be ignored, for these reasons:
Is money for acquisitions better spent to build electronic resources rather than collections of books? The answer is that both are essential. Unfortunately this answer produces tension, since, generally speaking, library budgets are not expanding to accommodate both and trade-offs are having to be made.
The point that electronic resources are too important to be ignored holds true for students training to serve in either Third World or ethnic minority contexts. This is so since:
Is the Western educational establishment being parochial and insular when it insists that its credentialing process entail training in how to access the universe of information? After all, other peoples have other values; and, some would argue, the value of types of knowledge is community based. The answer is that bringing to bear the full body of recorded knowledge and experience is, by its very nature, anything but parochial. Instead it enables people to transcend insularity.
If that is so, then the issue becomes more practical: How does an educational institution break through cultural insularity and effectively train people in the full scope of information access? Allow me to leave that as an open question.
A related but deeper issue, because potentially it will touch all institutions and all cultures, is the transforming effect of computer technology. Computers have a much greater impact than merely substituting one means of performing a function for another. For instance, they change orientations to information and they challenge institutional boundaries. Institutions and cultures will not remain the same. The impact cannot be avoided; but, if we are aware of it, we have some chance of influencing it.
A wild tiger has settled into our lap and we must beware of thinking that by keeping it on a leash and feeding it a few scraps we won't experience any implication.
In discussing access to remote information, it is important to be clear what is meant in this context. We are not talking about students accessing the resources of the library from a distance, but about the library serving as a hub of access to information held elsewhere. The question is this: Is money for acquisitions better spent if used to gain access to information held elsewhere, especially given that technology increasingly has the power to overcome distance?
Several points should be made:
The dream of accessing through a modem all the information needed for curricular study at a college or graduate level without going through a library is still far from realization, for many reasons. To name just two:
First, the corpus of electronic information is deceptively complicated. Often a student will do a simple database search and believe that all the essential information has been found, which is generally a false assumption.
Second, much of the electronic information needed by the student will entail cost; and the cost can take every conceivable form, from licensing fees, to access fees, to pay-as-you-go charges.
Libraries play a vital role in assisting the student to cut through the jungle of electronic information. Electronic information, both remote and acquired, has a complicated financial and research structure; and that structure has been added to rather than substituted for the structure of information in other media.
No consensus exists as to the long-term future of libraries, in part because the future of technology is notoriously unpredictable. However, it is evident that for the short-term, at least, libraries will continue to be an essential hub of information access.
In these days of turmoil with regard to information access, the library should continually assess the relationship of collection building to timely access, ever keeping in mind the rapid expansion of the virtual library. For the short-term and probably well beyond, collection building will continue to be vital to adequate curriculum support. In fact, in terms of allocation of resources, books still require a higher proportion than electronic resources in most fields of knowledge.
The material collections and services provided by the libraries of today have a compelling future, which must be supplemented rather than displaced by electronic resources, remote or otherwise. This means that it is still worth investing in books and library facilities, but that electronic access has now become a vital part of the picture as well. The challenge is for academic institutions to find the resourcefulness to afford both.
Posted, January 12, 1998; new url, January 28, 2004; last modification, January 28, 2004
Copyright ©1998-2004 by Norman E. Anderson
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