AARL

The future of the 'research' library in an age of information abundance and lifelong learning

Eric Wainwright

Abstract Traditionally, several types of library in Australia have been perceived as having a 'research' role, notably the National Library, the state libraries, and the university libraries, together with a few special libraries serving research-producing organisations such as the CSIRO. This paper provides some speculations on how some significant changes in the information environment may impact on the 'research' roles of libraries with a 'public' purpose.

The game has changed. We face an array of possibilities and challenges that will leave no library untouched. We are, whether we want to or not, about to become much more than we are now - or much less. Roy Tennant, 1998

The research roles of libraries

The 'research' roles of libraries have been several:

• Libraries with collections of materials which are objects of research. Many of the 'Australian' collections of the National Library and the state libraries fall into this category, eg oral history recordings, or manuscripts, which are unique items,
• Libraries with collections of materials which report the results of research - typically university libraries with large collections of peer-reviewed academic journals,
• Libraries which serve producers of research - university libraries serving academic staff and post-graduate research students, and
• Libraries which serve users of research - traditionally university libraries serving members of their institution, and to a lesser extent the public, and National/state libraries serving the 'independent researcher' - either to support further 'research' or 'learning' - traditionally regarded as different activities in an age of didactic teaching.

The nature of research

Several developments are impacting on this comfortable traditional pattern of research library services.

Firstly, the number of individuals engaged in 'research' has increased dramatically. Changes in educational approach, from primary school to university, mean that children as young as 7-8 years are engaged in research. Simple - yes, limited in scope to local observations - yes, short on wider analysis - yes, but nevertheless research, in the sense of investigation producing new data or thinking which can contribute to broader understandings. Rather than receivers of information transmitted from teachers, learners of all levels can be viewed now as 'neophyte researchers'. As well as this general pedagogical trend, the number of traditional academic researchers (staff and postgraduates) in Australian universities has increased very significantly over the past 30 years. To these can be added an increasing number of 'citizens of the Third Age' - typically, older ex-academic or ex-professional, generally educated people who have retired from full-time employment, in their 50's and 60's, pursuing independent research activities of interest to themselves.

As Houghton and his colleagues have concluded in their wide-ranging study of Australian research information '... there is a new mode of knowledge production emerging, changing research practices and bringing new information access and dissemination needs'.[1] This involves increasing diversity of location, increasing focus on interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, increasing focus on problems, and greater emphasis on collaborative work and informal modes of communication.

Outside the educational arena, the drive for improved government policy and service delivery has resulted in an increasing amount of problem-oriented research undertaken either directly by government organisations, or contracted through commercial and academic consultancies and research grants. This is occurring at all levels of government - federal, state and local.

The broadening of research activity has resulted in a shift of the balance of research away from discipline-focused work with the bulk of overall research activity now being problem and/or application-oriented, and often of a narrower locational focus. Such research may be highly beneficial for a local community, but a challenge is created in how the results may be integrated for broader understandings in the field concerned.

Research outputs

These changes in the pattern of research have considerable implications for libraries which purport to provide their customers with a 'research service'. Until relatively recently, university libraries could assume that they were meeting their user's requirements by subscribing to a good range of academic journals from the major societies and commercial publishers, together with a reasonable coverage of monographs providing some integrated understandings of research in a field.

But the outputs even of academic research are being found in an increasing diversity of places and formats. Faced with the price inflation and slow publication patterns of many journal publishers, research institutions and authors are reacting by:

• Publishing in 'open access' journals - free to the users, but sometimes requiring financial contributions from the author or author's institution.[2]
• Placing copies of research reports, or 'pre-prints' of articles and theses on their personal web sites, or more recently in 'institutional repositories',[3] or in 'disciplinary repositories' of e-prints, such as Arxiv or CogPrints.

Institutional repositories are also making more visible some of the primary outputs of research activity such as collections of photographic slides, oral history audio tapes, and a variety of unpublished research reports. As much of science, the social sciences and even some fields of humanities research become data-centric, much of the output of research also resides as 'datasets' held somewhere on an institution's network, perhaps linked via a URL from an electronic article or research report. More and more research demand is for direct dataset access for re-interpretation and data mining in conjunction with outputs from related projects, fuelling much of the current e-science/e-research agenda.[4]

In the case of 'neophyte' and independent researchers, outputs are now much more likely to be in the form of publication on personal or institutional websites, either as simple web pages, or as part of weblogs, wikis and personal electronic portfolios.[5]

Research availability

This very rapid growth of research publication, both in traditional formats such as the subscription journal and in the more recent institutional, discipline and personal web-based sources, is significant in itself. But its potential impact is greatly magnified by the parallel developments facilitating access to all of this material.

For the user attached to a university, the impact has been particularly dramatic. Undergraduate students now have almost immediate 'clickable' access to the more recent articles in about five times as many academic journals as were in the average Australian university library only about five years ago. Given the pressures on coursework students, the time taken to access relevant material in researching a topic is critical. It is quite possible that a student is now able to read (or at least scan, if not necessarily understand!) ten times as much relevant material in the time available, as was the case a decade ago.

Improved university access to research results has come partly as a result of the rapid decline in the cost of access to journals, particularly as a result of consortia 'big deals' involving packages of titles. For the independent research user confined to public libraries, the impact to date has been less. But as commercial publishers start to relax about revenue flows, the public library sector is beginning to be able to offer our communities more generally, direct access to a greater range of the traditional research literature. Good examples include the Council of Australian State Libraries consortium arrangements, and those of Victoria's 'Virtual Library' and NSW.net, which provide electronic full-text access to a substantial range of journals.[6]

But of far more importance has been the rise of Google, and the other major search engines, in providing anyone with access to the internet an effective and near-instantaneous means of linking to the vast resources of the web. The power of Google's algorithms, combined with the web's linkage mechanisms, means that even an untrained searcher is likely to be able to locate quickly a 'sufficing' level of information for their investigation. Whether librarians like it or not, Google and its counterparts have become the key channel to finding information, even in a research environment.

At present it may be argued that both traditional research articles and new repository material is poorly retrieved through the search engines. This is partly true, but seems likely to be temporary, as both Google and Yahoo have announced trials with academic publishers/aggregators such as CrossRef, and with public sector organisations such as the Library of Congress, OCLC, OAISter and the D-Space institutions. 'Open access' journals are, of course, by their nature freely available to the user through the internet, and an increasing number of authors have a freely available 'pre-print' or 'post-print' version of their articles on their own or their institution's website. The decision in May 2004 by Elsevier, as the world's largest academic research publisher, to permit authors to do this, has been particularly significant.

In the government sector, the drive to lower service costs, together with some genuine belief in the need for government to communicate to the public about its services and activities, has led in Australia to a very rapid roll-out of web-based information. While it is known that internal government research outcomes are sometimes suppressed for political reasons, nevertheless there is an increasing expectation (and reality) that government reports and government information more generally will appear on departmental websites soon after completion.

Digital divide?

From the above, it is reasonable to conclude that all Australian citizens now have reasonable potential access, primarily via the internet, to a vast abundance of information on almost every conceivable topic, including a very rapidly increasing volume of research information.

Critics of this apparently rosy situation will point out that the quality of physical access is very unevenly distributed, and that outside capital cities, internet access is still relatively expensive, slow or even non-existent. Nevertheless, federal and state government programs, and the commercial market place, are combining to enable the vast majority of Australians to have affordable home access, or access through facilities in their local public library, at school or local TAFE colleges. The continuing reduction in price of portable computers and other hand-held devices, and the advent of broadband wireless, seem likely to further improve connection options over the next few years.

But as several studies have pointed out, the so-called 'digital divide' is not primarily a matter of physical access to the network, important as this has been to try to achieve for all our citizens. The 'divide' is as much an issue of mindset. Many people simply do not yet see the internet generally, let alone research information, as having any relevance to their lives. Presented with freely available access at their homes, or in places such as public libraries, they make no use of the facilities.[7]

As many authors have pointed out,[8] the digital divide issue is a subset of the much broader problem of social inclusion, an issue of some significance for public library strategy.

Implications for libraries

To summarise, we are entering rapidly into a period when:

• The balance of research effort is shifting to multi-disciplinary, problem- and application-oriented objectives, for personal, government, educational and commercial reasons,
• Pedagogy in higher education is requiring more 'research' as part of learning at the undergraduate level,
• The publication pattern for research output is becoming much more varied, subject to very varied quality control, and very largely in electronic form accessible over the internet,
• The volume of research-based publication easily retrieved by the public without charge, and without mediation (through a library or other information agency) is vastly increased, and
• There is an increasingly educated public interested in research material for their personal interest, educational or career advantage, or community involvement.

These changes present both opportunities and threats to existing libraries. The recent wide-ranging environmental scan by OCLC noted:

The indisputable fact is that information and content on the open web is far easier and convenient to access and find than is information and content in libraries, virtual or physical.[9]

Will the combination of Google and the internet mean the demise of the library in its research roles? And if not, why not? But are these questions simply ridiculous at a time when the building of new and remodelled libraries, particularly public libraries, seems to be accelerating across the world?[10]

For the public library, the trends seem to me to offer mainly opportunities rather than threats - and particularly for those outside capital cities, if local authorities and state governments are prepared to work together effectively. As Bundy has stressed,[11] for success libraries need to provide attractive experiences, and be embedded in their communities as key contributors to the community's social capital. To achieve this, location, range of facilities and collaboration with other community services are likely keys to future success (or indeed survival).

But through the expansion of national and state library consortia, access to traditional research literature by public libraries is likely to be substantially improved. Together with the vast increase in other research resources on the internet, and involvement in collaborative online reference services such as Ask Now, public libraries can put themselves in a position to be very effective intermediators of research support for community activity. This would build on most public libraries' acceptance of their online roles in providing physical access, and professional support for internet navigation.[12] This will not be easy, and a major re-skilling of public library staff will be required.

But one major reason why public libraries may succeed in extending their role is that they retain a high level of trust from the public as purveyors of unbiased information. In his review of theories of the information society, Webster[13] has placed public libraries as squarely within the concept of the 'public sphere' as developed by Jurgen Habermas, ie an arena independent of government and enjoying autonomy from partisan economic forces, dedicated to rational debate. Compared with countries such as the UK or Canada, Australian progress towards more evidence-based policy development and local planning decision has been slow.[14] The UK has been particularly active, establishing an Active Citizenship Centre,[15] and a network of evidence-based research centres; and experiments with university/local authority collaboration to encourage greater local understanding and use of research.[16]

The idea has a long pedigree:

Popular government without popular information... is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. james madison (1751-1836)

With a more educated, and perhaps more politically sceptical populace seeking greater accountability of government, I consider that public libraries can build strongly on their traditionally trusted roles to play a part in engaging the community in evidence-based enquiry and policy development. To succeed, however, public libraries will have to become more heavily involved with their communities as part of an overall community engagement strategy.[17]

For the national and state libraries, the extent of their existing investments in physical Australiana collections suggests that they will continue to attract local readers for many years yet. But as their retrospective digitisation programs proceed apace, and a much higher proportion of their most used unique resources become internet-retrievable, there is some danger of their key research collections becoming invisible as 'search fodder' on the net. Their stronger continuing role may be in organising support of online access for all Australians to the commercial research publication (continuing to decline as a proportion of total research output), together with the coordination of online reference services, and online preservation of access to 'Australiana' wherever located.

For university libraries, the future of their research support services seems much more murky. As with public libraries, university libraries may provide network access points of 'last resort' in the form of 'information commons' for those undergraduates who do not have more convenient access via wirelessed portable machines, home, university residences or workplaces. But this service can easily be provided anywhere in a university. Their research collections are very rapidly becoming much smaller proportions of the total literature used by university staff in the research process. Very few academic staff now frequent library buildings in person, preferring to conduct their literature access online from their university offices or home. And as Markland[18] has indicated, many libraries are not actively engaged in, or as seen as relevant to, the development of information resources support for the 'virtual learning environments' being built by many universities.

One medium-term role is likely to become leadership in a university's promotion of its own research - through responsibility for building and maintaining an institutional repository of the university's research output of theses, research reports, preprints/postprints, etc and in extending this role to encompass coordination and support for access to datasets compiled by university researchers. The tools for effective distributed access to, and manipulation of, datasets, such as the Open Grid Services Architecture and the San Diego Supercomputing Center's Storage Resource Broker framework are beginning to facilitate remote access. But very few libraries are active in this area, nor do their staff have the skills to provide university leadership.

In a recent paper[19] to the Australian Library and Information Association biennial conference, I reviewed the strategies that I believe university libraries need to pursue in order to remain vibrant and necessary parts of their universities. One set of strategies revolves around their future as 'always open' physical aggregations of collaborative facilities which maximise learning opportunities,[20] as shared social capital. Another, and more relevant to their research role, is the need for libraries to develop a complete research support service which includes assistance through the whole life-cycle of information use in the research and knowledge production process - data gathering, literature search, publication and dissemination.

Whether university libraries will be successful in this goal seems likely to me to depend on whether they are proactive in developing new skills and services, and whether they succeed in remaining to be perceived as trusted advisers in linking researchers with research materials.

This issue of trust is crucial. Until recently users of research library services could generally rely on the fact that the materials available had been through at least two layers of quality control - first by publishers of academic journals and books, and then in the selection processes of the collecting libraries. As we enter a situation in which most research material becomes visible to a potential user through a Google-like search engine, these extrinsic quality checks are not present. This is in stark contrast to the material retrieved through the subject gateways constructed by libraries and professional societies, and via the discipline-oriented databases and indexes so beloved by reference librarians, where quality decisions on coverage are made by people with some level of disciplinary knowledge. Federated search systems, such as AARLIN, or those constructed by individual libraries through their library management systems, have built in quality decisions, in their selection of the databases to be included in their 'search universes'. On the other hand, the general search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, essentially allow a market vote to determine the retrieval ranking of items, through the extent to which those items are linked from other web pages.[21] Perhaps more significantly, they also disconnect each retrieved item from its 'quality binder'. For example, articles are retrieved and evaluated on their individual merits, rather than retrieved via their journal hosts, which are perceived to have varying quality levels. Similarly, chapters of e-books are excised from their container books, which typically have both author and publisher quality contexts. In the case of websites, and pre-prints or research reports, there may be few quality indicators at all.

Is a market-driven retrieval channel superior (in the sense of providing effective research access to relevant material of quality) to the traditional library database retrieval channel? Can federated search models really compete effectively with Google-like search engines? The jury is out at present, and the answers likely to be crucial to the future of research libraries. Amongst the glut of available material, what added value will research libraries provide to lifelong learners with both the physical access wherewithal and the search capability? Will it be primarily as providers of convivial social space in conjunction with other service providers? Will it be as pro-active information literacy providers, guides, and quality advisors to their respecting communities? Will it be primarily as institutions' research output organisers and coordinators? Or all of these and more? Or - none at all?

There is a danger for all libraries, particularly for university libraries, that they may continue to concentrate on refining their traditional services, rather than fundamentally re-assessing what their clientele need to support research and learning, and how the new technologies can be used to meet these needs more effectively. For example, why is so much attention still given to a library's catalogue? Does it have much meaning when most required material is not owned or licensed by the library? Is the librarian's traditional reluctance to provide advice rather than neutral information still appropriate? To what extent should information services remain reactive to client queries, as opposed to pro-active providers of, and guides to, alerting services using techniques such as RSS? Why do so few libraries provide 'book-finding' or 'article-finding' services which integrate the full-range of free and purchase, print and electronic options? Is 'serving you better, seeing you less' a worthy goal?

We finish as we began. This is a time of great challenge for research libraries. Their future will be determined over the next one to two decades. Only those which carefully review their objectives, engage fully with their communities, and systematically plan and implement changed services, will thrive - or even survive.

Footnote

This article was prompted by the editor's suggestion of my looking at the 'big picture', a reference back to a presentation I had made while at the National Library of Australia in 1995; and by Warren Horton's lifelong interests in politics, public policy, and the role of libraries in the protection of intellectual freedom - perhaps best encapsulated in his Australian Library Week Oration in May 1999, available at http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/speeches/horton.html

Notes

1. J Houghton et al Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment Canberra Department of Education Science and Training August 2003 p x
2. While 'open-access' journals currently comprise only 1-2 per cent of peer-reviewed journals this may change quickly, with new evidence suggesting that such journals may have considerably higher reader impact than traditional subscription journals. See for example, S Harnad and T Brody 'Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) via non-OA Articles in the same Journals' D-Lib Magazine vol 10 no 6 June 2004 at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html
3. The number of such repositories is increasing rapidly. See M Brogan A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services Washington DC Digital Library Federation Council on Library and Information Resources 2003
4. For a recent summary of e-science issues for libraries, see T Hey 'Why Engage in E-Science?' Library and Information Update March 2004 at http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archive/archive2004/march/update0403b.htm
5. See S Downes 'Educational Blogging' Educause Review vol 39 no 3 September/ October 2004 pp14-26 for an overview of the potential impact of weblogging in education; and D Love et al 'Portfolios to WebFolios and Beyond: Levels of Maturation' Educause Quarterly no 2 2004 pp24-37 on e-portfolios
6. A useful summary of National Library/State Library electronic initiatives, including enhanced access to research information, appeared in Australian Academic & Research Libraries vol 34 no 4 December 2003 pp292-309
7. S Wyatt et al 'They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach: Conceptualizing Use and Non-Use of the Internet' in S Woolgar (ed) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality Oxford Oxford UP 2002 pp23-40
8. See M Warschauer Technology and Social Inclusion. Rethinking the Digital Divide Cambridge Mass MIT Press 2003
9. OCLC The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition Dublin Ohio OCLC 2004 [also available from http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan]
10. C Mackenzie 'A New Renaissance in Library Buildings' inCite September 2003 p4
11. A Bundy 'Places of Connection: New Public and Academic Library Buildings in Australia and New Zealand' Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services vol 17 no 1 March 2004 pp32-47
12. For a broad summary of public library responses to internet development see E Fielding 'The Role of the Public Library in a Networked Environment: A Review of the Literature' Australian Library Journal vol 49 no 4 November 2000 pp327-356
13. F Webster 'Information Management and Manipulation: Jurgen Habermas and the Concept of the Public Sphere' in Theories of the Information Society 2nd ed London Routledge 2002 pp161-201
14. R Curtain 'What Role for Citizens in Developing and Implementing Public Policy? Part 1' Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration at http://www.apprn.org/pdf/Curtain_CitizenEngagementPart1.pdf
15. UK Home Office Active Citizenship Centre 'Building Civil Renewal in England and Wales' at http://www.active-citizen.co.uk
16. For example Norwich Access 'Making Research Count in the Personal Social Services' at http://www.cheshire.gov.uk/social/crossservice/research.htm
17. M Gurstein 'Effective Use: a Community Informatics Strategy beyond the Digital Divide' First Monday vol 8 no 12 December 2003 at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/gurstein/index.html
18. M Markland 'Embedding Online Information Resources in Virtual Learning Environments: Some Implications for Libraries and Librarians of the Move Towards Delivering Teaching in the Online Environment' Information Research vol 8 no 4 July 2003 at http://informationr.net/ir/8-4/paper158.html
19. E Wainwright 'People, Networks, Books: New Strategies for University Academic Information and Service Delivery' Australian Library and Information Association 2004 Biennial Conference Gold Coast 21-24 September 2004 at http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2004/
20. See a useful review of library/learning facilitation issues in S Burnett Libraries Designed for Learning Washington DC Council on Library and Information Resources 2003 at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub122/contents.html
21. T Brooks. 'The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google' Information Research vol 9 no 3 June 2004 at http://informationr.net/ir/9-3/paper180.html

Eric Wainwright (please remove '.nospam' from address) retired as James Cook University's pro-vice-chancellor (Information Services and Technologies) in October 2004, following periods as deputy director-general at the National Library of Australia and university librarian of the University of Adelaide. He is currently a principal of eKnowledge Structures, a Canberra-based consultancy.