Literature review
3.2.3 The development of leT and the academic library
lCT developments, as discussed earlier, have changed the academic library over the last few decades. However, libraries function within a broader context that includes the publishing and information market, changing modalities of scholarly
communication, and evolving capabilities in the user community. lCT has profoundly changed all aspects of higher education and scholarship, and these changes continue to unfold. Innovation and transfonnation for academic libraries take place within a broader context; therefore libraries cannot be considered in isolation of this context.
Starting in the late 1980s or early 1990s, academic libraries were confronted with environmental changes driven by lCT, which quickly moved the focus of attention away from automation towards a series of much more fundamental questions about library roles and missions in the digital age (Lynch 2000: 60).
Libraries were forced to react to developments in lCT and their cultural and economic consequences, rather than methodically exploiting them. The emergence of the WWW in the mid-1990s is perhaps the great symbol of this shift, with all its
implications for scholarly communication. At the start of the new century, libraries are struggling to absorb innovation and to recognize the implications and meanings of transformation. There is a rich and fascinating early history of ICT in libraries, reaching back to the 1950s and early 1960s, as part of the post-Sputnik revolution in science and technology. Yet for most academic libraries, this technology first arrived in force in the late 1960s or early 1970s in the form of locally developed or
commercial products intended to automate the library processes. Minicomputers were introduced to automate circulations, and books were bar-coded. Computer-based ordering systems were introduced to pass orders to book and serial jobbers. These changes simply made existing manual processes more efficient and helped to control their costs. This was a period of significant management challenges for libraries.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of this period, which continued until the early 1980s, was the development of shared copy-cataloguing systems (Chisenga and Rorissa 2001: 2).
Shared cataloguing was pioneered by a number of library consortia in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, these efforts have been consolidated into two major shared cataloguing systems, one operated by Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in Columbus Ohio, and the other by the Research Libraries Information Network in Palo Alto, California (Lynch 2000: 61). By the 1980s, the shared cataloguing databases had become quite large as a result of retrospective conversion programmes for older books and some years of use in cataloguing new acquisitions. The central databases began to reflect the collective holdings of the major research libraries. The next significant change was the development of OPACs as a replacement for the traditional card catalogue. The online catalogue was a huge advance. But it was almost completely irrelevant to many library users. Traditionally, library catalogues have contained entries for books and for serials but had not described individual articles in a journal.
Given that journals, rather than monographs, are key literature in many disciplines, particularly in the sciences, and that by the mid-1980s a typical research librarywa~
spending more than half of its acquisitions budget on journals, the library cataloguer was unresponsive to the needs of many library users, particularly in the sciences (Lynch 2000: 61).
Abstracting and indexing services, such as Index Medicus (now MEDLINE) for the health sciences literature, abstracted articles in journals and supplemented the local library catalogue. Since the 1940s (or earlier), libraries had been purchasing series of printed volumes. Not until the late 1980s and early 1990s were these abstracting and indexing databases mounted for interactive public access, both by research libraries and by new commercial services that marketed to the library community, opening up the journal literature to the library user in the same way that the online catalogue opened up the monographic literature. The 1980s and early 1990s also saw major investments in resource sharing. Union catalogues were one example; another was development of computer-assisted interlibrary loan systems that were built on the shared national union catalogue databases. A library that needed a book could find out which other libraries had it and could generate and manage a request to borrow it from one of those libraries through interlibrary loan. Facsimile technology was applied for the delivery ofjournal articles on an expedited basis (Chisenga and Rorissa 2001: 3).
Online catalogues, though wildly popular, rapidly created demand for actual content in digital form. Once library users had begun to enjoy the freedom of remote, twenty- four-hour-a-day access, they quickly grew frustrated with searches that ended with the identification of print material that they had to wait to get or that they could not easily get (for example, ifthey were searching a catalogue halfway across the world, at another institution). By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the costs of storage and bitmapped display technology had come down considerably, and networks had become faster. Itwas possible to deliver content, either as page images (bitmaps and later formats such as Adobe Portable Display Format (PDF)) or as American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) text (for materials that did not need charts, graphics, equations, or special characters). With the emergence of the Web, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) offered another alternative. Publishers and aggregators (companies that obtained material from multiple publishers and repackaged it into a "one-stop" database) began to offer this material to libraries.
Numerous troublesome issues arose; most of these are still unresolved (Lynch 2000: 64).
Libraries had already encountered the high cost and complexity of negotiating license agreements for abstracting and indexing databases. In the late 1980s, the world of scholarly communication, teaching, and research began to change as a result of networking and advanced leT. The idea of networked information emerged: a vast constellation of digital content and services that were accessible through the network at any time, from any place, could be used and reused, navigated and integrated, and tailored to the needs and objectives of each user. Networked information implied a breakdown of geography as an organising principle. All resources on the network were equally close, and they could complement or compete with each other;
relationships between information providers and information users became much more complex. International information sharing and collaboration were greatly facilitated. The use of the Internet became critical in many forms of scholarly
communication. By the early 1990s, the idea of the "digital library" was popularised.
Multimedia became a routine part of content and communication for learning and research: videos, images, simulations, virtual reality walk-throughs, and audio were all carried by the Web (Lynch 2000: 68).
In the networked information revolution, libraries not only offer their own networked- based services but are also becoming increasingly involved in the management
organisation of external activities on the network. Itis interesting to note that although the progress of automation in the past thirty years has focused on
implementation and management of technology, the agenda for the new century is almost dominated entirely by addressing effects and implications of technological change. Technological change has transformed the activities of the academic library as an organisation as a result of the new technological capabilities and the shifting context of higher education and scholarship:
Libraries have been part of am~orinformation revolution for more than a decade and must now rethink all their functions, services, and organizational structure. The impact of the electronic information environment and constantly changing technology are increasingly forcing librarians to deal with major changes. While librarians have to remainina continuous learning mode to keep up with new trends and sources, they must rethink how they do their work and how they provide their service. Now, however, librarians must begin to understand the changing desires and needs oftheir users as related to acquiring knowledge and using information (Rader 1999:
215).