Changes in Scholarly Communications: Implications for Technical Services

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information

Dr. Lynch first discussed a number of ways in which the "content world" is changing for libraries, as scholarly communication continues to develop under the pressure of digital innovation, and concluded with some specific observations about the impacts of this development on technical services. A frequent theme of his talk was that, although technical services will be implicated in many of these changes, and will assume a vastly expanded range of responsibilities, the traditional functional divisions that have been maintained in libraries will be less and less useful for management of innovation.

The first area of change in content has to do with "classical content": journals, monographs, and the like. A substantial proportion of scholarly journal literature is now being published electronically, and no longer simply as experiments. Most scholarly journals now operate in a dual, print/electronic, mode. The major factor which has held back the abandonment of paper publication is the concern for archiving, rather than the earlier concern of many scholars about the limited reach of electronic publication. However, digital publication of monographs still seems less viable, given the almost universal preference for reading this literature in hard copy.

Other important factors impacting the electronic management of traditional content are the proliferation of business models for distribution and bundling that librarians must now manage, the unpredictability of network performance, and the need to establish policies for usage, user authentication and privacy. The privacy issue is particularly potent, given the ease with which content suppliers can collect personal information, in detail, about individual patrons. We need to examine the extent to which authentication systems impede or enhance data collection abilities, and ensure contractually that statistical data is provided to us by suppliers.

To date, the large research libraries, as early adopters, have been at the forefront of these issues, but smaller institutions will soon need to examine the challenges and opportunities presented by networked access to traditional content. It is possible that, within two or three years, the proportion of digital materials provided may be greater at many smaller institutions than at research libraries. For example, access to journals backfiles available through programs like JSTOR could have a high impact on a teaching program, though such backfiles might not have been affordable enough to purchase in traditional formats.

The second area of change in content has to do with those materials which we have traditionally collected, but seem almost like new materials due to the shift to electronic formats. Among these are special collections, which are changing from the least to the most accessible of materials due to digitization. Rights clearance and organization are major challenges here. (Although standard monographic-style cataloging may not always be the best approach, Dr. Lynch noted that the cost of organization and description of digitized materials comprises 30-40% of the funding requested in grant applications.) The art and cultural heritage communities are joining in this effort, as more museums make the decision that their collections are "special" in a library/archival sense. Another important transition is that from physical cartographic materials to geospatial data. Maps, in this environment, have become a user interface, generated on demand to display geospatial data.

The third area of change in content is that involving fundamentally new forms of material, as faculty begin to apply technology to produce forms of communication that fall completely outside the structure of scholarly publishing. Among these are web sites in specific disciplines, which may combine monograph-like and multimedia material, integrate critical editions with commentary, and which change continually with no support for management and preservation. Online "collaboratories" are "both event and artifact," where real-time communication and experimentation are preserved for later review. Much of the science of the coming century will be done via collaboratories: how will we describe them, and how will the material in them be best retrieved? Similarly, seminars shared via digital video are both events and artifacts, with analogous challenges for description and retrieval. Since Internet 2 will have bandwidth that is "very hospitable to video," these live events -- not the same as packaged commodity courses -- will first be distributed via networks, then stored for subsequent viewing.

Dr. Lynch then turned to the technical services impacts of these development Acquisitions departments will need to select materials that come with no publisher's imprimatur, determine who holds the rights to intangible materials, and make decisions involving accessibility that are like those faced by archives. Acquisitions librarians will need to consider the whole "downstream" life of a resource as part of the purchase or lease negotiation.

In terms of organization, or cataloging, we will be challenged to provide internal organization of resources, as well as the macroorganization of collections. Most books have sophisticated internal organization tools (tables of content, indexes, etc.) but a work consisting of several hours of raw video is unlikely to have any internal organization. For the new materials to come, combinations of rigorous intellectual abstracting and indexing, along with the automatic indexing advocated by computer scientists, will be required. "Trust management" will also be a part of organization and retrieval, as users will need to be assured that descriptions of digital items are accurate and that their sources are as stated.

As distance education becomes more popular, and digital resources are incorporated into curricula, librarians will need to be proactively involved. Since higher education administrators rarely include a library strategy as part of distance education offerings, we must work with faculty to understand and analyze the electronic resource base needed for courses at different levels of sophistication. While introductory courses may not require much involvement, library support for research-intensive offerings is an area still largely unexplored.

In conclusion, while the general missions of libraries will not change radically in the foreseeable future, the strategies we will need to employ and the challenges we face will change. To address these, we will need to come back to first principles, a practice that is both more difficult and more energizing than remaining preoccupied with changes in procedure.