College and Research Libraries The Library: Center of the Restructured University Patricia Battin s Franklin Wallin, the president of Earlham College, observed in a recent article in Change, ''Universities have not moved much beyond amazement at the cost and power of the technological engines that drive this shift [from an industrial society to an information-based society], the com- puters and telecommunications that can come up with answers in nanoseconds and transmit them to everyone around the world in minutes. We struggle merely to keep up with this technology in our uni- versities. We have scarcely taken time to understand the educational implications of the change or conceive what a univer- sity might be like in the context of an infor- mation age.'' For at least a decade, librarians have been very much aware of the revolution- ary impact of developments in informa- tion technology. But the expansion of computer capabilities occurred at a time when research libraries were experienc- ing, for unrelated reasons, serious obsta- cles in serving scholarly needs. The tradi- tional bonds between scholars and librarians have been substantially eroded, and librarians' efforts to reinvent the li- brary in the electronic environment have often been actively opposed, widely mis- understood, or more generally, com- pletely ignored by scholars and adminis- trators. In addition, there appears to be widespread misunderstanding of the function of the research library in the pro- cess of scholarly communication and a pervasive misperception of the ''library'' as no more than a storehouse for books. As often happens in academic institu- tions, symbols become enshrined in my- thology and mortgaged to territorial juris- dictions, with the consequence that the basic function is obscured and over- looked. Traditionally we have defined the li- brary as a storehouse where librarians "mark and park," rather than as a place which has a scholarly information func- tion within the university. The introduc- tion of computer and communications technologies into the society were initially viewed as separate and distinct activities unrelated to the historic functions of the li- brary. The traditional organization of the university into largely autonomous units further inhibited the recognition of the es- sential relationship between the new tech- nologies and the information function of the library. In keeping with conventional organizational structures, university ad- ministrators departmentalized the func- tion, establishing an organizational bar- rier between libraries and computer centers. For almost a decade, there was lit- tle recognition that advances in communi- cation technologies were radically affect- ing the ways in which scholars communicate. One of the most powerful deterrents to change in conservative institutions-and I think the educational institution is one of our society's most conservative institutions-is the existence of strong au- tonomous vested interests and the fear of losing one's empire. Universities are no to- Patricia Battin is vice-president and university librarian, Columbia University, New York. Reprinted with permission from the American Associa.tion for High er Education, " Colleges Enter the Informa- tion Society, " Current Issues in Higher Education, 1983-84, no.l, p.25-31. 170 riously allergic to systematic, long-range planning efforts and have thrived for cen- turies on academic star-driven hiring prac- tices and program development. Conse- quently, the capacity for the kind of substantial, integrated, long-range insti- tutional planning required by the revolu- tion in information and communications technologies is lacking in most institutions of higher education. The weight of our historic traditions is such that we tend to find it very difficult to look at the future in terms of a vastly changed organizational structure. By as- serting the need for continuation of his- toric entities, like the Library or the Com- puter Center or the Office of the Provost, the necessary creative vision is stultified. The challenge for us all is to look at the re- alities of the present and the forecast for the future from the perspective of disinter- ested, objective university officers and then to re-invent the university in the elec- tronic environment. I would like to analyze briefly the func- tion of the library as we have known it his- torically, summarize some of the current activities in the library profession, and suggest the new capacities required by the modern university to continue to provide the essential level of scholarly information support. Such an analysis should provide an understanding of how best to organize the existing talents and strengths within the university to meet the new challenges. The word "information" is a trouble- some one. Academic librarians have al- ways distinguished between '' informa- tion" and "knowledge," and our basic philosophies and objectives have arisen from a commitment to the organization of knowledge and the support of continuing scholarship. Contemporary information managers and computer specialists tend to treat all information as data and are con- cerned more with the technical aspects of hardware and systems than with the sub- stantive content of data and its influence on systems of organization, storage, ac- cess, and retrieval. I use the term "schol- arly information" to define that subset of the information society which is vital to the university and to librarians as profes- sionals historically concerned with pro- The Library 171 viding scholarly support services. TRADITIONAL ROLES AND SERVICES Bill Ward, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, recently de- fined the ideal in library service from the scholarly perspective: "Scholars want what they want when they want it whether or not they know what it is they want." In the past, the university has sought to serve this fundamental need by maintaining bibliographically controlled archival collections of the printed record. The traditional role of the librarian in the age of printed formats-books, journals, and microforms-has been essentially ar- chival. The mission of the research librar- ian became the acquisition, recording, storage, and preservation of the intellec- tual record in printed form. For over five centuries, the book has served as the uniquely useful method of storing and transporting text and images assembled by the mind of an author. For more than a hundred years in the United States, librarians and scholars settled into a comfortable framework of scholarly communication in which the library repre- sented the essential link in the chain by mailing books available to scholars. The publication explosion, the rapid and inex- orable expansion of knowledge and inter- disciplinary research, the pressures of the "publish or perish" syndrome on the scholarly process, the demand for speed in information retrieval, and the radical changes in the financing of higher educa- tion, all combined two decades ago to be- gin to reduce the effectiveness of the tradi- tional library in the scholarly process. Traditional bibliographic services reflect the limitations of scholarly methodology of access to knowledge. In this era, the cat- alog served largely as the inventory of a specific collection of materials, and its rec- ords were linked to a specific location. Its usefulness as a scholarly tool depended upon the scope, size, and comprehensive- ness of the collection it described. The revolution in information techno!- . ogy has created, quite apart from difficul- ties caused by financial stringencies and publication explosions, totally new capac- 172 College & Research Libraries ities for generating, storing, and provid- ing access to scholarly information- capacities which no longer represent or require links to physical objects in station- ary collections. Communication among scholars has been liberated from the limi- tations of the printed page, and that liber- ation has brought with it the corollary de- mand for a new set of lifelines. Universities are now faced with a dual challenge: we must provide new struc- tures of access to knpwledge in an increas- ing variety of formats and, at the same time, continue to preserve, manage, and make available scholarly information in the traditional printed formats with ap- propriate links between all formats. It is essential to emphasize that the whole structure of our research activity in the United States, as we know it, is based upon the knowledge access structures conceived and built over the years by the library profession. Now it is quite possible that many of these activities are costly, outmoded, and do not deserve to survive the transition to the electronic age, but I think we must understand the actual func- tion of libraries in the process of scholarly communication in order to insure a con- tinuation of essential functions in the new environment. The most striking feature of traditional academic organizations, and the one I be- lieve is most misunderstood and ignored by our academic colleagues, is the virtual isolation of the library in the organization. Despite the rhetoric about it being ''the heart of the university,'' the library and li- brarians have been for years isolated from the policy. councils of most institutions. This isolation was possible because our present system of research support evolved from a tradition of autonomy, symbolized by the autonomy of the printed word. Public policies governing access to information and institutional structures implementing those policies re- flect that autonomy. There is a kind of double-speak in this respect. The Library has been organizationally treated as an isolated, autonomous component of the institution. Yet, increasingly, its function is to provide integrated services on the lo- cal, regional, and national levels. There- May 1984 suiting tension between the functional ex- pectations and the organizational realities have contributed to the current percep- tions of ineffectiveness and impotence. The new communications technologies require new collective approaches which in tum demand radically different organi- zational structures to create and support such enterprises. The extreme frustration of the library profession is matched only, I believe, by the frustration and unde- served disdain of administrators and scholars for the library profession's per- ceived inability to cope with the new de- mands. In summary, we have built during the past five centuries a remarkable and suc- cessful educational and research estab- lishment centered around the book as the primary medium of scholarly exchange. But, despite the age of our system, we re- ally know very little about how this pro- cess actually works or what we need to as- sist us in the task of re-invention. NEW COMMUNICATION LINKS The needs of scholars always have tran- scended local barriers, and, for the past decade, the library profession has been engaged in developing new communica- tions links between the disparate compo- nents of our decentralized "national li- brary.'' Although the Library of Congress often acts unofficially as a national library, it is precisely what its name implies-the Library of Congress-and all efforts to es- tablish it as a truly effective national li- brary, responsive to the needs of the na- tional scholarly community, have failed. The American ''national library'' is a de- centralized system composed of the Li- brary of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the National Library of Agricul- ture, and approximately one hundred pri- vate and public research libraries located across the nation. In the new environment iii which the bibliographic machinery no longer represents a mirror of a physical collection, librarians' efforts have been concentrated on ways 1) to provide new structures of access to new formats of knowledge no longer bound by physical and geographic constraints, and 2) to link the multiplicity of scholarly resources, '· both print and non-print, into an easily ac- cessible system which will eliminate costly duplication and the unacceptable isolation of individual scholars. The complexity of a decentralized pri- vate and public research library system in the United States is further compounded by the emergence of powerful corpora- tions in the for-profit sector which are seeking control of the ''knowledge indus- try'' and introducing the concept of fee- per-use of information. The fact that our copyright laws do not adequately address the issues of copyright protection and the ownership of information in the electronic environment creates additional difficul- ties. Within this context, there are several major efforts now in progress to provide rational, affordable, computerized infor- mation services for scholars. The Library of Congress provides, via its MARC tape service, the records of its cata- loging in machine-readable form. The LC Name Authority File also is available on line as are the bibliographic records from the Government Printing Office and the National Library of Medicine. There are three bibliographic utilities which distrib- ute these machine-readable records to li- braries across the country. In turn, the participation libraries, using varying stan- dards, contribute bibliographic records with location symbols prepared for mate- rials not yet recorded in the data base. The phenomenal growth of these data bases has resulted in a vastly increased capacity to share cataloging responsibilities and thus reduce local institutional expenses. The existence of these large data resources has revolutionized interlibrary loan capac- ities and made possible the potential for developing a coordinated national collec- tion through new means of access to de- centralized collections. The two major bibliographic rtetworks- OCLC and RUN-provide information on a combined total of 18 million unique rec- ords for books, maps, manuscripts, peri- odicals, audiovisual materials, sound re- cordings, and music scores. OCLC maintains a large research and develop- ment capacity for the exploration of new technologies, primarily involving interac- tion between information seekers and The Library 173 computers (commonly referred to as "user-friendly" interfaces), electronic document delivery, microcomputer appli- cations in libraries, and on-line catalog re- quirements. The corporation recently has announced its intent to commit a substan- tial portion of its research efforts to the de- velopment of a national communications service, including electronic mail and fac- simile transmission capacities. The Research Libraries Group (RLG) represents a focused effort by a number of research universities and their libraries to reshape information services for scholars. In contrast to OCLC, which is a mass- market driven enterprise, RLG derives its direction from the program needs of its owner-member research institutions. Per- haps its most dramatic achievement to date is the development of a computerized capacity to achieve bibliographic control of East Asian vernacular material. The de- velopment effort will permit computer supported creation, copy, amendment, search, display, and output of biblio- graphic records composed of East Asian characters. In addition to standard biblio- graphic services, RLG also maintains on RUN several special data bases, including the Avery Architecture Index, SCIPIO (an index of art sales catalogs) and the Eigh- teenth Century Short Title Catalog. Plans are underway to create a special data base of bibliographic records for machine- readable data files in the humanities and social sciences. At the present time, the utilities are not linked, thus creating serious access prob- lems for scholars since institutional partic- ipation is usually limited to one utility. The Council on Library Resources, a pri- vately funded foundation, launched some years ago a Bibliographic Services Devel- opment Program to help bring into exis- tence a comprehensive, logically consis- tent, non-redundant data base of biblio- graphic records. To insure comprehen- siveness, the data base must be built by a set of cooperating, contributing institu- tions adhering to a common set of stan- dards. The element of non-redundancy requires the use of an authority file to re- cord the entities that have been created ac- cording to the set of accepted rules. The 174 College & Research Libraries objective of this program is to create a widely available, cost-effective biblio- graphic record service that will incorpo- rate the resources of the major shared cat- aloging services and provide access to a variety of bibliographic data bases in a manner transparent to library users. For the past three years, the Library of Congress, the Washington Library Net- work, and the RLG have worked on a co- operative project funded by the Council on Library Resouroes to develop a stan- dard network inter-connection which con- sists of a seven-layer communications protocol which will permit computer-to- computer communication. This project will be completed by ithe end of 1983 and represents an extraordinary example of li- brary leadership in the application of com- munications technology for academic pur- poses. Plans are underway to develop the capacity to conduct bibliographic searches through the links with the ultimate objec- tive of full-text transmission. The relatively sudden availability of af- fordable personai romputer:s promises an- other major revolution in reseMtch mffio-r- mation services within the next five years. The new powerful microcomputers will have storage and retrieval capacities equal to the large mainframes of the past de- cade. Many American universities are planning the "wiring" of their campuses to support the demand by students and facul ty for computerized information -ser- vices. Both RLG and OCLC are planning technical architectures which will permit the orderly and effective decentraliza'fion of many currently centralized information services, and we are beginning to see the first efforts of the for-profit sector to mar- ket bibliographic information directly to the end-user, a phenomenon which tr-ans- fers costs normally borne by the .institu- tion to the individual scholar on a per use cost basis. But the technical systems represent only a capacity to communicate. The effective- ness of new systems of access to scholarly . resources will depend upon the coopera- tive efforts of the university community to identify and develop the substance of new structures of access to knowledge, a pro- cess which will demand new organiza- tional capacities in the university. May1984 POUCY IMPLICATIONS There are six major policy areas which will demand specialized and unprece- dented attention from university officers during the next five years. In each of these areas, an organizational mechanism to draw together currently disparate compo- nents of the university is required for ef- fective action. 1. Centralized financial and technological planning. The successful and cost-effective integration of the various information support services will require a centralized long-range planning capacity and a re-cast budgeting process to accommodate the following characteristics of the new ser- vices: a. th.e avchival obligations of scholarly information support services, regardless of format; b. the introduction of high technology wli.th its corollary built-in obsolescence; c. the magnitude of the capital costs re- rqumed; d. the integration of services offered through book and journal collections, :mainframes, microcomputers, and local M-ea networks; e. the provision of access for local scholars to external knowledge data bases, ililetworks, etc. 2. iL111!~gration of information services with aoa.demic programs and priorities. In contrast to ((])'ther '' in£ormation professionals,'' aca- demic Hbrarians have traditionally made substantial contributions to the organiza- tion of knowledge within the old structure of printed formats . The new formats will require similar efforts to build new access structures to knowledge and to work with scholars in identifying and defining the basic access structures in each discipline which must be mastered to enable in- formed judgments. More so than ever be- fore, a university or college degree should certify a certain level of bibliographic liter- acy and competency in information sources in a particular discipline. There should be within the university a central capacity to assist the departments of in- struction and research in the development of these skills. 3. Access to scholarly resources. As men- tioned earlier, one of the major contribu- tions of the library profession to scholar- ship is bibliographic control over the printed record. A problem for computer data archivists today is the lack of atten- tion paid to these issues during the early days of data collection by computer spe- cialists and scholars. The Roper Center estimates a five- to ten-year effort will be necessary to achieve the cataloging necessary to enable effec- tive retrieval below a very broad descrip- tor level. We need to know a lot more than we do about the specific ways in which scholars will use on-line information sources, but we do know it will be essen- tial to provide orderly and standardized retrieval mechanisms in considerable depth for archival collections in all for- mats. National agreement within the scholarly community on a variety of stan- dards affecting cataloging activities, com- munications networks, and hardware ca- pabilities will be essential to prevent both the unacceptable isolation of individual scholars and a generalized Tower of Babe1. 4. Electronic publishing . The advent of electronic capabilities provides the univer- sity with the potential for becoming the primary publisher in the scholarly com- munication process. At the present time, we are in the untenable position of gener- ating knowledge, giving it away to the commercial publisher, and then buying it back for our scholars at increasingly p:r~ hibitive prices. Universities have long served as publishers' distributors and warehousers and have served that :role be- cause of the perceived advantages in hav- ing a form of ownership conhol over pm- chased information. The e]ectronic revolution ptovides the potential for developmg, universi!tty c