The School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at
Panel 5.6 MELVYL
to provide services that concentrated on sharing catalog and indexing records. When the web emerged and publishers began to supply the full text of journals, the organization and technical structures were in place to acquire these materials and deliver them to a large community of users. This panel also describes the California Digital Library, a new venture built on the foundations of MELVYL.
Panel 5.6 MELVYL
The nine campuses of the University of California often act as though they were nine independent universities. Campuses, such as the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), rank as major universities in their own right, but organizationally they are parts of a single huge university. They have shared a digital library system, MELVYL, for many years. For much of its life, MELVYL was under the vigorous leadership of Clifford Lynch.
At the center of MELVYL is a computer-based catalog of holdings of all libraries in the nine campuses, the California State Library in Sacramento, and the California Academy of Sciences. This catalog has records of more than 8.5 million monographic titles, representing 13 million items. In addition to book holdings, it includes materials such as maps, films, musical scores, data files, and sound recordings. The periodicals database has about 800,000 unique titles of newspapers, journals, proceedings, etc., including the holdings of other major California libraries.
MELVYL also provides access to numerous article abstracting and indexing files, including the entire Medline and Inspec databases. In 1995, MELVYL added bit- mapped images of the publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The images were linked through the Inspec database. Users who accessed the Inspec database could see the message "Image available" for records with linked IEEE bit-mapped images. The user could then request the server to open a window on the user's workstation to display the bit-mapped images. Use of the books and periodicals files is open to everybody. Use of the article databases is limited to members of the University of California.
MELVYL has consistently been an early adopter of new digital library technology.
Much of the development of Z39.50 has been associated with the service. The MELVYL team was also responsible for creating the communications network between the University of California campuses.
The California Digital Library
The success of MELVYL helped the creation in 1998 of an even bolder project, the California Digital Library. This is the University of California's approach to the organizational challenges posed by digital libraries.
Each of the nine campuses has its own library and each recognizes the need to provide digital library services. After a two year planning process, the university decided in 1997 to create a tenth library, the California Digital Library, which will provide digital library services to the entire university. Organizationally this digital library is intended to be equal to each of the others. It director, Richard Lucier, ranks equally with the nine other directors; its initial budget was about $10 million and is expected to rise sharply.
The university could easily have justified central digital library services through arguments of economies of scale, a focus for licensing negotiations, and leveraged purchasing power. For these reasons, the campuses have historically shared some library services, notably MELVYL, which is incorporated in the new digital library.
The California Digital Library is much more ambitious, however. The university anticipates that digital libraries will transform scholarly communication. The digital library is explicitly charged with being an active part of this process. It is expected to have a vigorous research program and to work with organizations everywhere to transform the role of libraries in supporting teaching and research. These are bold objectives, but the organization of the library almost guarantees success. At the very least, the University of California will receive excellent digital library services; at the best the California Digital Library will be a catalyst that changes academic life for everybody.
Secondary information providers and aggregators
The term secondary information covers a wide range of services that help users find information, including catalogs, indexes, and abstracting services. While many publishers are household names, the suppliers of secondary information are less well known. Some, such as Chemical Abstracts, grew out of professional societies. Others have always been commercial operations, such as ISI, which publishes Current Contents and Science Citation Index, and Bowker, which publishes Books in Print.
OCLC has a special niche as a membership organization that grew up around shared cataloguing.
These organizations are simultaneously vulnerable to change and well-placed to expand their services into digital libraries. Their advantages are years of computing experience, good marketing, and large collections of valuable data. Many have strong financial reserves or are subsidiaries of conglomerates with the money to support new ventures. Almost every organization sees its future as integration between secondary information and the primary information. Therefore there are numerous joint projects between publishers and secondary information services.
Aggregators are services that assemble publications from many publishers and provide them as a single package to users, usually through sales to libraries. Some had their roots in the early online information systems, such as Dialog and BRS. These services licensed indexes and other databases, mounted them on central computers with a specialized search interface and sold access. Nowadays, the technical advantages that aggregators bring is comparatively small, but they provide another advantage. A large aggregator might negotiate licenses with five thousand or more publishers. The customer has a single license with the aggregator.
Universities and their libraries
Changes in university libraries
Like most organizations, universities have difficulty in handling change. Universities are large, conservative organizations. The senior members, the tenured faculty, are appointed for life to work in narrowly defined subject areas. Universities are plagued by caste distinctions that inhibit teamwork. The cultural divide between the humanities and the sciences is well-known, but an equally deep divide lies between scholars, librarians, and computing professionals. Faculty treat non-faculty colleagues with disdain, librarians have a jargon of their own, and computing professionals consider technical knowledge the only measure of worth.
The academic department dominated by tenured faculty is a powerful force toward retaining the status quo. To close a department, however moribund, is seen as an act of academic vandalism. When a corporation closes a factory, its stock price usually goes up. When Columbia University closed its library school, nobody's stock went up.
There is little obvious incentive and much vocal disincentive to change. Until recently, Oxford University still had more professors of divinity than of mathematics.
Yet, universities are a continual source of innovation. Chapters 2 and 3 included numerous examples where universities developed and deployed new technology, long before the commercial sector. The flow of high-technology companies that fuels the American economy is driven by a small number of research universities, such as Stanford and Berkeley near San Francisco, Harvard and M.I.T. in Boston, and Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
Innovation in a large organization requires strategic reallocation of resources. New initiatives require new funding. Resources can be found only by making hard choices.
The process by which resources are allocated at a research university appears arcane.
Moving resources from one area to build up another is fraught with difficulties. The director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford once mused that the best strategy for the museum might be to sell part of its collection to provide funds to look after the rest; he doubted whether he would retain his position if he carried out such a strategy.
Few deans would advocate cutting faculty numbers to provide resources that will make the remaining faculty more productive. Yet funds are reallocated. Year-by-year the portion of the budget that goes into computers, networks and support staff increases, one percent at a time.
In the long term, it is not clear whether such reallocations will bring more resources to existing library organizations, or whether universities will develop new information services outside their libraries. The signals are mixed. By a strange paradox, good information has never been more important than it is today, yet the university library is declining in importance relative to other information sources. The university library, with its collections of journals and monographs, is only one component in the exchange of academic information. Fifty years ago, faculty and students had few sources of information. Today they have dozens of methods of communication. New technology, from desk-top computing and the Internet, to air travel and video conferences, allows individual scholars to exchange large amounts of information.
The technology has become so simple that scholars are able to create and distribute information with less help from professionals and outside the formal structure of libraries.
If libraries are to be the center for new information services they have to reallocate resources internally. Discussions of library budgets usually focus on the rising cost of materials, overcrowding in the buildings, and the cost of computing, but the biggest costs are the staff. Few universities make an honest effort to estimate the costs of their libraries, but a true accounting of a typical research library would show that about twenty five percent of the cost is in acquisitions and fifty percent in staff costs. The other costs are for building and equipment. If libraries are to respond to the opportunities brought by electronic information, while raising salaries to attract excellent staff, there is only one option. They will have to reorganize their staff. This is not simply a question of urging people to work harder or streamlining internal processes; it implies fundamental restructuring.
Buildings for digital libraries
An area of change that is difficult for all libraries, but particularly universities, is how to plan for library buildings. While digital libraries are the focus of research and development around the world, for many libraries the biggest problem is seen as the perennial lack of space. For example, in December 1993, the funding councils for higher education in the United Kingdom released a report on university libraries, known as the Follett Report. In terms of money, the biggest recommendation from the Follett Committee was the need for a major building program. This need was especially acute in Britain, because the numbers of students at universities had grown sharply and much of the space was required to provide study space on campus.
The expense of a new building to house rarely-used paper is hard to justify, but old habits are slow to change. Imposing library buildings are being built around the world, including new national libraries in London and Paris. Many libraries retain a card catalog in elegant oak cabinets to satisfy the demands of a few senior users, even though the catalog is online and no new cards have been filed for years.
To use a traditional library, the user almost invariably goes to the library. Some libraries provide services to deliver books or photocopies to offices of privileged users, but even these users must be near the library and known to the library staff.
Users of a digital library have no incentive to visit any particular location. The librarians, webmasters, and other professionals who manage the collections have offices where they work, but there is no reason why they should ever see a user. The New York Public Library must be in New York, but the New York digital library could store its collections in Bermuda.
The dilemma is to know what will make a good library building in future years. The trials and tribulations of the new British Library building in London show the problems that happen without good planning. Library buildings typically last at least fifty years, but nobody can anticipate what an academic library will look like even a few years from now. Therefore the emphasis in new library buildings must be on flexibility. Since modern library buildings must anticipate communications needs that are only glimpsed at today, general purpose network wiring and generous electrical supplies must be led to all spaces. Yet the same structures must be suitable for traditional stacks.