College and Research Libraries I ~ . I F. WILFRID LA·NCASTER Whither Libraries? or, Wither Libraries The claim "is made that society is evolving from one whose formal communi- cation patterns have, for centuries, been based primarily on print on paper to one in which communication channels will be largely paperless ( elec- tronic). Some reasons why this transition seems inevitable are discussed. A scenario for a paperless communication system is presented, anc) some . technological achievements that lend credibility to this scenario are de- scribed. The profession is urged to give immediate and serious consideration to the role of the library in an electronic society. THE PROBLEMS CONFRONTING libraries, particularly research libraries, have received much attention in the last few years. It has frequently been said that libraries face a "crisis." The causes of this crisis are already identified. A typical academic library, while doubling its expenditures in less than a de- cade, finds itself with a budget that buys proportionately less and less of the newly published literature, because the cost of this literature and of personnel to handle it are both increasing much faster than general indicators of inflation in the economy. At the same time the literature continues its inexorable growth, and many libraries, de- spite being unable to "keep up" with this growth, face acute shortage of space. These problems have been addressed by many writers, some of whom have sug- gested what the library needs to do, now or in the future, in order to cope with them. The implications of escalating costs of peri- odical subscriptions, for example, are dealt with by Fry and White 1 and, less thor- oughly but more entertainingly, by De Gennaro. 2 The space problems are dis- cussed by Gore, 3 and Baumol and Marcus have provided a rather comprehensive analysis of the economics of academic librar- F. Wilfrid Lancaster is professor, Graduate School of Library Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . ies, highlighting the labor-intensive nature of library activities. 4 Proffered solutions to these problems in- clude increased sharing of resources through networking and other cooperative activities , deliberate curtailment of library growth (the "zero growth" library), more "scientific" approaches to the selection and retirement of materials, and increased re- liance on library automation. All these solutions assume that publica- tions, the raw materials with which libraries deal, will continue to exist in much the same form in which they have appeared for the last five hundred years , i.e. , as print on paper or as micrographic images of print on paper. Library automation is seen only as the application of computers to the manipu- lation of machine-readable records for documents in print on paper form. In the librarian's view (see, for example , Josey5 ), the library of the future looks only cosmeti- cally different from the library of the pre- sent. Salton, one of the most outspoken critics of library operations and approaches to their automation, seeks a solution in the form of a "self-reorganizing" library but is still preoc- cupied with the handling of documents in print on paper form; only their repre- sentations are manipulated by computer. 6 Licklider is one of the very few writers to come close to a realistic vision of what the I 345 346 I College & Research Libraries • September 1978 library of the future may really look like. 7 But Licklider has not been taken too seri- ously by the library profession. It is my belief that the prevalent view in the profession of the library of the future, and how this library will handle the prob- lems already besetting it, is myopic in the extreme. This view ignores the significance of many social, technological, and economic trends, quite evident in the world around us, that point unambiguously to the fact that many types of publication, perhaps the great majority, are highly unlikely to exist indefinitely in print on paper form. The Na- tional Science Foundation has stated the case rather clearly: The limits of what can be communicated by printing, mailing, storing, and retrieving pieces of paper may be at hand. Certainly, for any real improvement in the accessibility and usefulness of information an alternative must be found. 8 Whether we like it or not, society is evolving from one whose formal communi- cation has, for centuries, been based almost exclusively on print on paper to one whose formal communication will be largely paper- less (i.e ., electronic). Why this evolution, which is a completely natural process, ap- pears inevitable, and what an electronic communication system may look like, will be discussed in the remainder of this paper. PAPERLESS SYSTEMS Publications exist, presumably, as a means of transmitting messages from one individual (writer), or a few individuals, to a great many other individuals (readers). The message may consist of results or opinions based on scientific or humanistic research, industrial or ~ommercial experience, or some other facet of professional practice. Such messages are · disseminated for their potential value as sources of information. Other types of messages, such as poetry and novels, are presumably disseminated for their potential value as sources of enter- tainment or inspiration. They are disseminated as documents in the form of print on paper because, for many types of message at least, there has been no other convenient way of reaching a wide audience. This situation is now chang- ing. It is now possible to transmit messages in a completely electronic mode. The mes- sage is keyed at some on-line computer terminal and transmitted, probably by regu- lar telephone lines, to many other terminals at which it can be read. The message can be stored "electronically" by the recipient, who can also do many other things to it ~e.g., index it, add to it, annotate it, redis- tribute it) without in any way generating paper copy. In an electronic environment of this kind, paper does not need to exist at all. It seems highly probable that, in the future, the great majority of "messages" now created and distributed as print on paper will no longer be created and distributed in ·this form. Instead, they will be distributed elec- tronically. This is likely to apply to all types of message now transmitted for their infor- mation content (but not necessarily those designed for entertainment), including in- dexing and ~bstracting services (which will undoubtedly be the first to disappear in printed form), handbooks, directories, tech- nical reports, patents, standards, the sci- ence journal, and journals in the social sci- ences and the humanities. · The implications of this for libraries are obviously of the greatest significance. The library problem will no longer be one of in- adequate space. It may not even be one of inadequate financial resources. Rather, it is likely to be one of justification for existence and simple survival. Will libraries be needed in an electronic wot ld in which documents exist in machine-readable rather thim printed form and any such document can be accessed by any individual who can reach a terminal wherever that document happens .to be stored? Before a document can be disseminated electronically, two requirements must be satisfied: (1) It must exist in a machine- readable form, and (2) the audience to whom it is directed must all have receiving terminals readily accessible to them. Clearly, these requirements are not satisfied at the present time, although it is very likely that they will be satisfied, for a wide range of documents and users, in the fu- ture. Moreover, the requirements are now beginning . to be satisfied in some rather specialized applications .. The most notable example is the defense/intelligence commu- nity. A large part of the documentation of I ... I l I I ~ Whither Libraries? or, Wither Libraries I 347 intelligence interest-perhaps in excess of 60 percent-is already transmitted "electri- cally" through wire communications devices. If the majority of the intended recipients have on-line terminals readily accessible to them, there is no need to generate paper copy at the point at which the message is received. Instead, the message can be dis- seminated to a user terminal, read there, put into an electronic file, redirected, or disposed of in some other way. In point of fact, the intelligence community in the United States is moving rapidly towards such paperless systems. Many components already exist. So do prototype systems in which documents are generated, transmit- ted, used, stored, indexed, and retransmit- ted in a completely paperless mode. The intelligence community is in an un- usually fortunate position in terms of the implementation of electronic systems of this kind. In addition, its need for such systems exceeds, perhaps, that of any other commu- nity: the volume of documents disseminated is extremely large (several thousand each day), and these must be distributed and acted upon very rapidly. But there is no reason to suppose that paperless systems will be restricted to defense/intelligence ap- plications. Indeed, it seems almost certain that they will emerge in virtually all fields of human endeavor. Take, as an example, the publication sys- tem by which the results of scientific re- search and technological experience are formally transmitted. The health of this sci- ence communication system is of great im- portance to all of us . Economic, social, and industrial progress are all dependent on sci- entific discovery and technological inven- tion. _ _These, in turn, depend heavily on the ability of the science community to assimi- late the results of previous research, since modern science is a social activity in which progress is made through group endeavor and a process of gradual accretion, one group building on the work of another. But the results and interpretation of completed research can only be assimilated by the science community if they are prop- . erly reported and the reports efficiently dis- seminated throughout the community. Au- thors, publishers, librarians, information scientists, indexers, abstractors, and many other individuals all play very important roles in this communication cycle. A break- down in the cycle could have very serious consequences. Science itself would stagnate if its own achievements were no longer re- ported, disseminated, and assimilated in an efficient manner. I believe that the formal science com- munication system, still heavily dependent on a science journal that has changed rela- tively little in 300 years, is already showing signs of breaking down. Some channels are · almost closed. Others are beginning to close. As long as we continue to disseminate the results of science research as print on paper, the situation will inevitably dete- riorate further. These results are becoming increasingly less accessible to that part of the population that relies on the printed word. There is no long-term solution to this problem through publication and distribu- tion of information in print on paper form. PRESENT PROBLEMS IN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION Why do I feel it necessar¥ to paint such a gloomy picture? There are now many prob- lems involved in the use of the literature of science and technology, especially in the "current awareness" aspect of its use. One obvious problem is simply that of growth. As the field of science and technology itself grows, there are more research results and practical experiences to be reported. The literature grows, then, in step with scien- tific and technical growth and at a very rapid pace . This "information explosion" really has two dimensions. This can be seen if we con- sider the distribution of documents as es- sentially a packaging problem . The dimen- sions of growth then become: (1) growth in the number of packages and (2) growth in the size of the packages. Growth in the number of packages is well exemplified by the growth in the number of published journals in science and technol- ogy. Best available estimates indicate that there are now about 50,000 journals in sci- entific and technical areas published throughout the world and that this number is steadily increasing at a compound rate in the range of 2 to 4 percent a year (the rate of growth has not been established precisely 348 I College & Research Libraries • September 1978 to everyone's satisfaction). If this were the only dimension of growth , the problems created would be less serious than they actually are. But the size of the packages, as well as their number, is increasing. That is, each journal tends to in- crease in size as more papers are written and submitted for publication. For example, Sandoval et al. have reported that Bio- chimica et Biophysica Acta has been grow- ing at an approximately logarithmic rate since its foundation in 1947. This journal now doubles in size about every 4.6 years. 9 Besides growth in number and size of journals, of course, we have growth in numbers of technical reports , patents, dis- sertations , films, videotapes, and other documentary forms. This growth in the vol- ume of literature published creates great problems for anyone who wants to keep up to . date in any field of specialization. The problem is simply this: The literature of the field grows rapidly, but the time that any individual has to read it remains more or less the same. A hypothetical scientist spends 10 percent of the working day in "keeping up with the literature, " and this proportion is the same in 1976 as it was in 1966. Yet , twice as much is published in 1976 as was published in 1966. Thus the scientist must either fall further and further behind in current awareness activities or must improve efficiency by using better methods of surveying the literature. Since secondary publications are guides to and synopses of the primary literature, it is obvious that these too must increase at approximately the same rate as the primary literature . Once more , we have increases in the number of secondary publications as well as increases in the size of these publi- cations. It has been estimated by Ashworth that there are about 3,500 such publications in existence in the world and that about 1,500 of these are in scientific and technical fields. 10 The "internal growth " of secondary publications was demonstrated by Ashworth in the following remarkable data on the number of years it took Chemical Abstracts to publish successive millions of abstracts: First million 32 years (1907-38) Second million 18 years Third million 8 years Fourth million 4. 75 years Fifth million 3.3 years Clearly, if the primary literature of chemistry continues its pattern of exponen- tial growth and if Chemical Abstracts con- tinues to attempt to keep up with this growth, we are rapidly approaching a time at which Chemical Abstracts must publish a million abstracts in a single year. A problem closely related to the growth of the literature is the dispersion or scatter of the literature. The more a particular sub- field of science grows the more dispersed the literature is likely to be. In a typical field of research, all the papers published are likely to be scattered among a great number of journals, although quite a high proportion may actually appear in a rela- tively small number of "key" journals in the field. To take a hypothetical case, there may be 375 papers published in a particular subject area in a single year. These are widely scat- tered over 155 journals. A small number of journals , only five in fact , contribute about a third of all the papers , and as few as thirty journals may contribute two-thirds of all the papers, but the final third is distributed over as many as 125 journals. A hypothetical scientist who routinely scans five journals in his or her field of spe- cialization, if lucky enough to choose the most productive five , might cover as much as one-third of the published papers. The scientist would need to routinely scan very many more journals-about thirty in this example-to increase coverage to two-thirds of the published literature and could do this only if fortunate enough to scan the most productive thirty journals. Very few scien- tists scan this many journals. In fact, a typi- cal scientist is likely to scan only five or six regularly. The only way to keep up to date effec- tively, then, is by scanning secondary pub- lications or, better yet, participating in a current awareness service in which a com- puter is used to search this secondary litera- ture. It is no longer possible to keep well informed simply by scanning a small sample of the primary literature. Even through the use of secondary services scientists are un- likely to discover every paper of potential relevance to their interests , but they might I I l Whither Libraries? or, Wither Libraries I 349 be able to push their coverage up to, say, 90 percent, which is a great improvement on what one could expect to achieve by scanning only the primary literature. Another problem is that there are quite substantial delays involved in the publica-· tion of primary and secondary literature. There may be a delay of several months, and perhaps more than a year, from the time a paper is submitted for publication to the time it actually appears in print. There will also be some delay from the time a re- search project is completed to the time a paper describing the project is submitted for publication. Thus the paper published in the science journal is likely to report re- search completed many months earlier. As more papers are written and submit- ted for publication, publication "backlogs" develop and greater delays occur because many papers are competing for the limited publication space available. Roistacher, for example, quotes the case of the journal Sociometry, which in 1974 received 550 manuscripts for review but had space to publish only 39 of them . 11 As publishing space becomes increasingly scarce, because publishers restrict growth in an effort to contain price increases, publication delays increase. It is a delusion to regard the science journal as a reflection of current science re- search. Indeed, it is more archival than cur- rent, reporting research concluded many months ago and perhaps begun years ear- lier. Information from this research has long ago been disseminated to those well inte- grated socially within the science commu- nity. Professionals who want to keep at the forefront of their fields cannot rely tm the science journal alone but must also use other types of documents (e.g., technical reports) and, more importantly, tum to in- formal channels of communication. The final problem that should be men- tioned is that of cost. The publication pro- cess is a very expensive one, and publication costs have been increasing extremely rapidly because of increasing costs of labor, materials, and physical plant. The cost of publications to the buyer must also increase to keep pace with these inflationary ele- ments in production. The problem is par- ticularly severe in that not only are produc- tion costs increasing but the amount to be published is also increasing. Publication costs would increase even if the amount published remained the same. But when the amount published and production costs both increase, the resulting price increases to the buyer become very serious. The most severe price increases have af- fected the secondary publications. Some of these have experienced price increases of 850 percent in a ten-year period. In 1940 Chemical Abstracts could be purchased for only $12 a year. In 1976 it cost $3,500 to subscribe to this publication! The primary literature of science has also experienced great price increases. The average subscrip- tion price for a chemistry or physics journal in the United States, for example, went up from $18.42 in 1965 to $65.57 in 1975, and further substantial increases are forecast. De Gennaro mentions the case of Inor- ganica Chimica Acta , which was available to libraries at an annual subscription of $26 in 1970 but cost $235 in 1975, a staggering increase of 804 percent. 12 The implications of these price increases are obvious. The cost of some science pub- lications increased several hundred percent in a period in which the rate of inflation in the economy (as measured, for example, by the Wholesale Price Index) was only 60 percent. Psychological Abstracts , to take but one example, increa~ed in price from $20 in 1963 to $190 in 1973. The accessibil- ity of this publication is thus greatly re- duced unless the average salary of a psy- chologist increased by a comparable 850 percent in the same period, which is clearly not the case. The trend is unambiguous. The secondary publications of science have, to a very large extent, priced themselves beyond the pocket of the individual scien- tist. They have become available only in li- braries. But the greatly increasing costs of at least some of these services are putting them be- yond the reach of the smaller institutions. Thus they become available only in the larger, wealthier institutions . The same fate is in store for the science journal. The ratio of institutional to individual subscribers is changing, slowly but surely, in favor of the former . Baumol and Ordover point out that "a growing proportion of scientific journals 350 I College & Research Libraries • September 1978 have virtually no individual subscribers but are sold almost exclusively to libraries," 13 and De Gennaro claims that "many com- mercial publishers have lost interest in per- sonal subscribers and no longer quote rates for them in their advertising copy. " 14 The primary literature of science will soon be accessible only in libraries; later, the more expensive journals will be accessi- ble only in the larger libraries. If scientific publication continues in its present form. it seems inevitable that primary journal sub- scriptions will continue to move to the in- stitutional subscriber, while the major sec- ondary services will move increasingly out of the reach of the smaller or less wealthy libraries. The general accessibility of the lit- erature declines as a result . The fact that the cost of science publica- tions is increasing at a much faster rate than general indicators of inflation in the economy is very largely due to the fact that the printing and publishing industry is still very labor-intensive and, unlike many other industries, has not been able to increase its productivity substantially through automa- tion. The industry lags far behind most oth e rs in this respect. This is evident from an examination of the Industrial Production Index·. Between 1967 and 1974, U.S. indus- try as a whole increased its productivity by some 24.8 percent. The rubber and plastics industry increased its productivity by 64.4 percent . But productivity in the printing and publishing industry grew only 12.3 per- cent in this same period. Libraries , as suggested earlier, find them- selves in an unusually adverse situation in this economic picture. Libraries constitute a labor-intensive industry that is dependent for its ra~ materials on another labor- intensive industry. This causes the prob- lems identified earlier: budgets growing rapidly but dwindling in purchasing power relative to total expenditures . Thus figures prepared by Dunn et al. indicate that the mean expenditures of fifty-eight major re- search libraries increased 103 percent be- tween 1965 and 1972. 15 In this same peri- od, mean expenditures for materials and binding increased only 78 percent, and these libraries were adding only 35 percent more volumes in 1972 than they were in 1965. As Baumol and Marcus have shown, the cost of operating libraries increases rapidly even in a period of comparative sta- bility in the economy as a whole. 16 The only long-term solution to all these problems appears to lie in a greatly in- creased level of automation in the complete system through which the results of re- search (in science , the social sciences , technology , the humanities) are dissemi- nated , stored, retrieved , and used. In other words , the only solution , . in these fields as in the intelligence field , lies in completely paperless (i.e. , electronic) information sys- tems. THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF AUTOMATION Considerable improvements in access to sources of scientific, technical , and other in- formation have already occurred through automation. The two major developments have been the rather phenomenal growth of machine-readable data bases and the equally impressive spread of on-line systems to make these accessible. It is reasonable to accept the MEDLARS data base of the Na- tional Library of Medicine, dating from 1964 , as the first such data base to be widely used in the provision of information services . It is now estimated that there are in excess of 500 data bases or data banks used routinely in the provision of various types of information service, and more and more of these are becoming readily accessi- ble on-line. MEDLARS provides a good illustration of the increasing accessibility of information sources through automation. In 1965, when the MEDLARS retrospective search service was just beginning, virtually all of the ex- pertise in searching this data base was con- centrated in a handful of search analysts on the staff of NLM itself, and the volume of searches that could be conducted in the United States was severely limited, perhaps to something on the order of 3 ,000 a year. When the MEDLARS off-line network was fully developed at the end of the de- cade , the situation had considerably im- proved. Through the establishment of a network of regional MEDLARS centers and through the training of information spe- cialists on the staffs of these centers , the number of qualified MEDLARS analysts in- creased considerably, to perhaps fifty active Whither Libraries? or, Wither Libraries I 351 searchers , and the number of searches handled in the United States rose to about 20,000 a year. The move to on-line processing, in the 1970s, caused a further dramatic improve- ment in the situation. In 1975 there were about 300 MEDLINE centers operating in the United States, the number of trained searchers had increased to perhaps 500, and the number of searches conducted had grown to about 20,000 each month in the United States alone , with many additional searches occurring elsewhere in the world. The cost of access to information sources on-line has also declined dramatically. In 1970, when I began to demonstrate on-line search capability at the University of Illi- nois, the cost of a one-hour demonstration was estimated to be about $50, of which about $3 was actual computer time and the remainder was communications costs (a reg- ular telephone call to California). Now, through TELENET, the data communica- tion network operated by the Telenet Communications Corporation, the same demonstration can be conducted at a total communication cost of $3. In 1977 Bibliographic Retrieval Services was quoting on-line connect costs as low as $10 per hour for high-volume users (about eighty hours per month). For use of data bases for which no royalties are charged, t-hese rates bring the cost of an average on- line search down to something in the neighborhood of $2.50 to $3.50, exclusive of terminal rental or purchase costs (minimal when amortized over many searches) , the time of the searcher, and cost of printing ci- tations off-line. Even with a royalty charge of $15 per connect hour, the total on-line costs for a search could be as low as $5. 75 to $8.50. On-line access to many data bases is al- ready cheaper than the purchase of printed access. It costs $3,500 a year in subscription alone, ignoring storage and handling costs, to make Chemical Abstracts accessible on library shelves. But an on-line search of this data base might be conducted, through Bib- liographic Retrieval Services, for $10 or less and is likely to be much more effective than a search of the printed tool. A library would need to do 350 searches a year in Chemical Abstracts to bring the per-search cost of data base access in printed form do'wn to the per-search cost of access on-line. Machine-readable data bases and on-line technology change the entire economics of access to information sources. Purchase of access to a data base in printed form re- quires a capital outlay in subscription, in storage , and in handling costs. This invest- ment can only be justified if the annual vol- ume of use of the data base is sufficient to bring the cost per use down to a reasonable level. But on-line services make data bases accessible in an on-demand, "pay as you go" mode, and their costs are much less de- pendent on volume of use. In fact, they make data bases readily accessible to librar- ies that could not afford to purchase access to the printed equivalents. In summary, the growth of machine- readable data bases, and of on-line access to these, has had the effect of: improving the availability of information sources, drasti- cally reducing geographic distance as a bar- rier to communication, making information sources as readily accessible in a small community as they are in a major city, and significantly reducing the cost of access to these resources. It would be true to say, in fact , that the electronic accessibility of information re- sources is improving as rapidly as the acces- sibility of printed sources is declining and that the cost of electronic access is falling as rapidly as the cost of printed access is climbing. Moreover, and this is the most important point, cost and accessibility though electronics will continue to improve, while cost and accessibility through print on paper can only get worse and worse. A SCENARIO FOR THE FUTURE Significant achievements in automation have occurred, then, in the publication of secondary services, in the resulting growth of machine-readable data bases, and in the rapid increase in information services de- rived from these data bases. Other achievements, although less impressive, have occurred in the _automation of acquisi- tions, cataloging, circulation, and other li- brary activities. Automation has so far had much less im- pact on primary publication and almost no impact on the distribution and use of pri- 352 I College & Research Libraries • September 1978 mary literature. Yet, major improvements in the dissemination and exploitation of in- formation will only come when the entire communication cycle-from the composition of a document to its distribution and use-is automated. In other words, these major im- provements depend on the emergence of completely paperless information systems . I believe that such systems will emerge; in- deed, they are inevitable. What, then, is a science communication system likely to look like in, say, the year 2000? There are, of course, some basic assump- tions underlying any discussion of a paper- less future. These assumptions are that computers will continue to increase in power and decline in cost, that methods of data transmission will become more efficient and less costly, that new storage devices will make it economically feasible to hold extremely large volumes of text in a readily accessible form, and, most important of all, that computer terminals will be reduced in price to a point at which every scientist will have such a device in the office and, very likely, in the home. All of these develop- ments, which seem highly probable, will produce the communication "structure" that will permit the substitution of the electronic medium for many of the activities and in- stitutions that we now take for granted as operating largely on the basis of print on paper. The scientist of the future will use a ter- minal in many different ways: to receive text, to transmit text, to compose text, to search for text, to seek the answers to fac- tual questions, to build information files, and to converse with colleagues. The termi- nal on the desk will provide a single point of entry to a wide range of capabilities that will substitute, wholly or in part, for many activities that are now handled in different ways: the writing of letters, the receipt of mail, the composition and distribution of re- search reports, the receipt of science jour- nals, the collection of documents into per- sonal files, the searching of library catalogs and printed indexes, the searching of hand- books of scientific data, visits to libraries and other information centers, and even certain types of professional "conversations" now conducted through the telephone or face-to-face encounter. In brief, the scientist (or, indeed, other professional) will use some form of on-line terminal to compose text, transmit text, receive text, conduct searches for data or for text relevant to a . particular research problem, and build per- sonal information files. We can reasonably assume that the scien- tist will use a terminal as a type of elec- tronic notebook in which details and obser- . vations on ongoing research are · recorded. These informal notes, recording background to the study, equipment and methodology used, results achieved, and interpretation of these results, can be entered at any time into a designated "ongoing project file." It is from these informal notes that the scien- tist will construct research reports. The reports themselves, both those that must be submitted regularly to a sponsoring agency and those to be made more widely known through some more formal publica- tion process, will be written at the terminal. In the process of composition, the author will, of course, draw from the notes in the electronic notebook Some rather sophisti- cated text editing programs will make it very simple to make alterations in the text-transposition of sentences or para- graphs, deletions and corrections, and even the wholesale substitution of one word for another throughout the report. In addition, there will be available various on-line refer- ence tools, including dictionaries and data banks of various kinds, which will make the task of accurat~ reporting so much easier. Presumably, too, the author will have the capability of electronically copying into a report any quotations, tables, or biblio- graphic references to be drawn from reports already accessible in machine-readable files. In an electronic environment, the problems of checking bibliographic references will be an order of magnitude more simple than is true at present. · When reasonably satisfied with what has been written, a scientist may decide to have the report reviewed, in an informal way, by some professional colleagues. The scientist will submit the draft to these colleagues, within his or her own institution or far be- yond it, electronically. This may mean that the text is copied from one's personal files (which no one else may access) into some controlled access file. A message, addressed Whither Libraries? or, Wither Libraries I 353 to those colleagues who are to review the report, is put into the communication sys- tem. The message asks these individuals if they would examine the draft and gives the information (including a password) that will allow them to access the text. When one of these scientists next goes into a "mail scan" mode at a terminal (which could conceiv- ably be seconds after the message is en- tered), that person will see the message and, when ready to do so, call up the text for examination. The comments of the re- viewers are transmitted to the author in the same way. The author, of course, may choose to modify the report on the basis of the com- ments received. When it reaches its final form, the report may be transmitted elec- tronically to its final destination. This may be the files of a sponsoring agency, or it may be the publisher of some electronic journal. I suggest that the publication of primary literature in the year 2000 may in fact be a more or less direct electronic analog of the present system. Descriptions of ongoing re- search projects will get into on-line files similar to those ' now maintained by the Smithsonian Science Information Exchange. Patents will be stored in machine-readable patent files, dissertations in dissertation files, standards in standards files, and so on. Unrefereed technical reports would be ac- cessible through data bases maintained by government agencies and other sponsors of research. Science "journals" would continue to be published by professional societies and commercial enterprises. By this I mean that these organizations would build machine- readable data bases, in special subject areas, that would be roughly comparable to the present packaging of articles into printed journals. Thus I can visualize the existence of an applied physics file, maintained by the . American Institute of Physics; a heat trans- fer file, maintained by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; and so on. Re- fereeing would continue, but all communi- cation among referees, authors, and editors would take place electronically. The alloca- tion of reports to referees could be handled more efficiently through on-line directories of referees, through automatic scheduling and follow-up procedures, and perhaps through some profile-matching algorithm, which allocates each report to those avail- able referees whose interests and experi- ence coincide most closely with the scope of a particular article. Acceptance of an article into a public data base implies that the arti- cle ha.s satisfied the scientific review process and received the "endorsement" of the pub- lisher. In the electronic world, however, space considerations are less likely to be a major constraint on how much is accepted for pub- lication. This may mean that more articles can be accepted by the first source to which they are submitted, resulting in greatly re- duced delays in making research results widely accessible. It may also mean that ac- ceptance for publication need no longer in- volve a binary decision. Instead, as Rois- tacher suggests, the refereeing process may lead to the allocation of some type of nu- merical score to a paper, the score reflect- ing the judgment of the referees on the value of the contribution. 17 Every article having a score above some pre-set value would be accepted into the data base, the score being carried along with the article. Even the articles falling below the required value might, with the permission of the au- thors, be accepted into a second-level data base. Once the articles become accessible to the scientific community at large, a form of "public refereeing" becomes possible. The system itself can record the degree of use that a particular item receives, readers can assign their own weights to an article, using some standard scale, and they can place their comments (anonymous or signed) into a public comment file, with comments linked to the identifying numbers of arti- cles. The electronic system, then, may allow an author, whose contribution re- ceived a low initial rating from the referees, to be "vindicated" by the reaction of the wider community of scientists. The processes by which an article is sub- mitted, reviewed, and accepted for publica- tion may not, then, be radically different in the year 2000 than they are in 1977. It seems more likely, however, that a paper- less system may force rather sweeping changes in the way the science literature is 354 I College & Research Libraries • September 1978 distributed and paid for. It would certainly seem undesirable if the distribution proce- dures of the electronic system are more or less direct equivalents of the present situa- tion. H a scientist is expected to subscribe for the privilege of accessing one or two data bases, a major defect of the present system-the rather inefficient way in which reports of science research are packaged- would simply be perpetuated. Obviously preferable would be some immense SDI servic.e through which scientists are au- tomatically notified of any new report, added to any accessible data base, that matches a stored profile of their interests. They could then use a terminal to access the full text of any item brought to their at- tention by the SDI service that they wish to pursue further. The implementation of a global SDI ser- vice of this kind is technologically feasible right now, but it raises major questions re- lating to organization, administration, and division of responsibility. How many SDI services should exist in the electronic envi- ronment, and who should manage and maintain them? It would certainly seem in- efficient if each publisher of primary data bases must maintain its own SDI program. Perhaps this function would become a prime responsibility of the present pub- lishers of secondary services. Thus we might expect to see the emergence of na- tional and international on-line SDI · ser- vices, based upon discipline-oriented and mission-oriented secondary data bases. Individual users would be billed for the amount of SDI service they receive, the great size of the population served bringing the cost per individual down to a figure that could become rather insignificant. The SDI services used would bring the scientists ci- tations, and perhaps abstracts, of new litera- ture (from all types of sources) matching their interest profiles. For each item brought to their attention in this way, the system will be able to provide, on request, an indication of how they can access the full text and how much it will cost to access it. A scientist who chooses to access the com- plete text of any item, which would be maintained in the files of a primary pub- lisher, must presumably pay for the privilege of doing so. The paperless com- munication system is likely to be much more a "pay as you go" one, with individu- als paying for just as much as they choose to use rather than subscribing to conventional journal packages, a large part of the con- tents of which may not be directly relevant to their interests. The secondary publisher would presum- ably continue to be involved in the indexing and abstracting of the primary literature, al- though most of the abstracts would simply be those provided by authors and primary publishers. All indexing, of course, will be carried out on-line. The "scope" of a secondary data base, however, would no longer be defined in terms of a list of journals (or other sources) covered. Instead, I foresee the need for var- ious levels of SDI within the communica- tion system. The interest profiles (gigantic ones) of the secondary publishers would be matched ag~inst updates of primary data bases so that items of potential interest would be disseminated to these secondary services rapidly and automatically. The customers of the secondary pub- lishers, and/or of information centers, would in tum have their interest profiles matched regularly against the data bases of these in- stitutions. This, of course, is just one possi- ble "model" for a dissemination system of the future. The model may seem a rather radical departure from the ways in which primary publishers, secondary publishers, and information centers now operate. But, if we are indeed moving into an electronic age, such radical departures from tradition are almost inevitable. Scientists, then, can have their interest profiles matched regularly against one or more SDI services operated by secondary publishers or by some form of information center. These services, to which they or their institutions subscribe, will draw their attention continuously to new literature of all types-research reports, journal articles, dissertations, patents, standards, regu- lations-corresponding to their current pro- fessional interests. I use the term "continu- ously" deliberately, because I view this as an operation in which the· scientist can rea- sonably expect to get a few things each day in the mail, rather than receiving a much Whither Libraries? or, Wither Libraries I 355 larger output at weekly or monthly inter- vals. Any item for which there is no use can be disposed of immediately simply by depress- ing an appropriate key. Items that appear to be of some interest can be pursued at once. Alternatively, the scientist may choose to read off the bibliographic data into his or her own private electronic files for later ac- tion. An item viewed in its entirety can also be placed into private files in much the · same way that an article may be photo- ~ copied and placed in the paper files of an individual. In the electronic world, the machine- readable file of resources replaces the paper file. But in the private electronic file an item can be indexed in any way, and with as many access points, that the user wishes. The paperless personal file will have infinitely greater search capabilities than the paper files it replaces, and it will occupy virtually no space (since, conceptually at least, a report need exist physically in only one file, its "existence" in other files being achieved through the use of pointers to master files of primary text). So far we have considered only input to an electronic communication system, dis- semination of items within this system, and the building of files of these items. The sci- entist will also need to search for information-both factual data and text de- scribing particular phenomena of interest. At present, the scientist will seek -informa- tion of this kind through personal files or conversations with colleagues or consul- tants. Sometimes (but frequently as a last resort) the scientist will visit a library or other formal information center. In the electronic system, all these approaches to information seeking may be conducted through the same terminal. The terminal, of course, gives access to one's own information files (and, possibly, the information files maintained by col- leagues or by one's department). If these files fail, the terminal will provide an entry point to a vast array of outside sources. Ac- cessible on-line will be machine-readable files that are the electronic equivalents of printed handbooks, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, and other refer- ence tools. The scientist will also have ac- cess to on-line indexes to primary text, pre- sumably built and maintained by those same organizations that provide SDI ser- vices. Scientists will be able to use a "widening horizons" approach to their information seeking in this environment, going from personal files to institutional files to national and international resources. And· any useful item of data or piece of text that they un- cover during the search can, of course, be added rather easily to their personal infor- mation files. But not only files will be accessible through the terminal. Human resources will also be available. On-line conversations (in "real time" or somewhat delayed) can be carried out with consultants, professional colleagues, and information specialists lo- cated at information centers or information analysis centers (which may, in fact, be 10,000 miles distant) . The electronic mailing system can be expected to displace the present mailing system for much, if not all, professional and business correspondence. In the electronic world the distinction be- tween formal and informal channels of communication is likely to be much less dis- tinct, and attempts to melci the two forms (e.g., the formation of information exchange groups) will become much more practicable, through rapid and efficient communication processes, than they are in the present print on paper environment. In my opinion, there is no real question that completely paperless systems will emerge in science and in other fields. The only real question is "when will it happen?" We can reasonably expect, I feel, that a rather fully developed electronic informa- tion system, having most if not all of the features mentioned, will exist by the -year 2000, although it could conceivably come earlier. The implementation of the system will involve the coming together, or rather the deliberate "putting together," of a number of separate services, activities, and experi- ments already in existence. Major steps to- wards a paperless system have already oc- curred through the growth of machine- readable data bases and data banks and the increasing accessibility of these resources through on-line technology. We can reasonably expect a continued 356 I College & Research Libraries • September 1978 growth in the number of available data bases, with rapid developments occurring in the social sciences and in the humanities as well as in the sciences, and the achieve- ment of even greater levels of accessibility through the further implementation of in- formation networks. We can also expect to see increasing bodies of primary text be- coming available in machine-readable form as more and more publishers convert to computerized operations. The "editorial processing center," as de- scribed by Bamford among others, may provide the opportunity for even small pub- lishers to automate their production proc- esses.18 At the same time, significant fur- ther improvements will undoubtedly occur in computer and communications tech- nologies, and these developments will result in greatly reduced costs for the storage, transmission, and exploitation of textual ma- terial in very large quantities. Computer text-editing capabilities were already quite advanced in 1971 when Van Dam and Rice reviewed the state of the art, 19 and many improvements in this technology have occurred since then. In the business world, "word processing" is replac- ing "typing," and the paperless office (see, for example, Yasaki20) is becoming a reality. Computer conferencing, as described by Price, 21 is developing rapidly, and some business organizations are already relying on this form of communication to replace the conventional mail service for intracom- pany correspondence. We are also begin- ning to see the establishment of a few small, experimental "journals" in electronic form. On-line systems to support the building of personal information files have been available at several universities in the United States for some years. It would not be an exaggeration, then, to say that all the features of the model described could be implemented today if these various technologies and experiments were brought together to form a new science communica- tion system. I do not wish to give the impression, however, that no problems of implementa- tion exist. Elsewhere, I have identified var- ious technological, intellectual, and social problems of implementation and suggested that this sequence is one of increasing com- plexity. 22 It is not my intention to repeat the discussion of these problems here. It is sufficient to say that, while some of these problems may appear "thorny," they are certainly not insoluble. CONCLUSION We are moving rather rapidly and quite inevitably toward a paperless society. Ad- vances in computer science and in com- munications technology allow us to conceive of a global system in which reports of re- search and development activities are com- posed, published, disseminated, and used in a completely electronic mode. Paper need never exist in ·this communications environment.· We are now in an interim stage in the natural evolution from print on paper to electronics. Now the computer is used as an efficient means of typesetting, but the resulting publications are still dis- tributed, through the mails, as print on paper. Machine-readable data bases exist side by side with printed data bases but have not yet replaced them. This situation will undoubtedly change. When on-line terminals are sufficiently commonplace that the great majority of po~ tential users of a publication have ready ac- cess to them and when the volume of use of machine-readable data bases is large enough to assume their complete financial support, we will witness the transition to electronic distribution and use of information sources, that is, we will achieve completely paper- less systems. This brings me, at last, to the real point of my paper. Can libraries survive in a largely electronic world? Will they be needed when the raw materials with which they have traditionally dealt are no longer available in printed form but are all readily accessible, on demand, to anyone with a terminal and the ability to pay for their use? If libraries and librarians will be needed, what functions will they perform, and how will they perform them? Folk, in his description of a future elec- tronic system, suggests that "libraries would also wither away, their historic duty done. "23 It is not my intention to investi- gate here the credibility of this statement. But a thorough analysis of the potential role ' ~ ' I Whither Libraries? or, Wither Libraries- I 357 of libraries in an electronic society is long overdue. The profession seems to have its head in the sand. The paperless society is rapidly approaching. Ignoring this fact will not cause it to go away. The profession, if it is to survive, should now be devoting energy to the serious study of how it can adapt to life in this society. Unless it now faces up to the question " Whither libraries?" it will in- deed face the prospect of "wither libraries." REFERENCES 1. Bernard M. Fry and Herbert S. White , Pub- lishers and Libraries: A Study of Scholarly and Research journals (Lexington , Mass .: Lexington Books, 1976). 2. Richard De Gennaro , "Escalating Journal Prices: Time to Fight Back," American Li- braries 8 :6~74 (Feb. 1977). 3. Daniel Gore, ed . , Farewell to Alexandria: Solutions to Space, Growth , and Perfor- mance Problems of Libraries (Westport, Conn . : Greenwood Press, 1976). 4. William Baumol and Matityahu Marcus , Economics of Academic Libraries (Washing- ton, D. C.: American Council on Education, 1973) . 5. E. J. Josey , ed ., New Dimensions for Academic Library Service (Metuchen , N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1975). 6. Gerard Salton, Dynamic Information and Li- brary Processing (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1975). 7. J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). 8. National Science Foundation, " Request for Proposal 75--136, A Systems Analysis of Sci- entific and Technical Communication in the United States" (Washington, D .C. , 14 Aug. 1975), p . l. 9. Armando M. Sandoval and others, "The Ve- hicles of the Results of Latin American Re- search: a Bibliometric Approach." Unpub- lished paper presented at the thirty-eighth World Congress of FID , Mexico City, 27 Sept.-1 Oct. · 1976. 10. Wilfred Ashworth, "The Information Explo- sion," Lib~ary Association Record 76:63-68, 71 (April 1974). 11. Richard C. Roistacher, "The Virtual Journal, " Computer Networks 2:18-24 Gan. 1978) . 12. De Gennaro , " Escalating Journal Prices: Time to Fight Back, " p. 70. 13. William J. Baumol and Janusz A. Ordover, " Public Good Properties in Reality : The Case of Scientific Journals." Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Soci- ety for Information Science, San Francisco, 1976, p.460. (Available on microfiche as part of the Proceedings of the ASIS Annual Meet- ing, 1976). 14. De Gennaro , " Escalating Journal Prices : Time to Fight Back," p. 71 . 15. Oliver C. Dunn and others, The Past and Likely Future of 58 Research Libraries , 1951-1980: a Statistical Study of Growth and Change (197~71 ed. ; Lafayette, Ind .: Pur- due Univ ., 1972) . 16. Baumol and Marcus , Economics of Academic Libraries. 17. Roistacher, "The Virtual Journal. " 18. Harold Bamford, Jr. , "The Editorial Process- ing Center," IEEE Transactions on Profes- sional Communication PC-16:82-83 (1973) . 19. Andries Van Dam and David C. Rice, " On- Line Text Editing : a Survey, " Computing Surve ys ," 3:93-114 (1971 ). 20. Edward K. Yasaki , "Toward the Automated Office ," Datamation 21:5~2 (Feb. 1975) . 21. Charlton R. Price, "Conferencing Via Com- puter: Cost Effective Communication for the Era of Forced Choice ," in Harold A. Linstone and Murray Turoff, eds. , The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications (Reading , Mass .: Addison-Wesley, 1975). 22. F . W. Lancaster, Toward Paperless Informa- tion Systems (New York : Academic Press , 1978). 23. Hugh Folk, "The Impact of Computers on Book and Journal Publication," in J. L. Di- vilbiss, ed., The Economics of Library Auto- mation: Proceedings of the 1976 Clinic on Li- brary Applications of Data Processing (Ur- bana, Ill. : Univ. of Illinois, Graduate School of Library Science, 1977), p . 79.