Selected papers from CONSAL XII in Brunei 9781845444075, 9780861769926

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Volume 38 Number 3 2004

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Program electronic library and information systems Selected papers from CONSAL XII in Brunei Guest Editors: Johnson Paul and Lucy A. Tedd

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Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38, Number 3, 2004

ISSN 0033-0337

Selected papers from CONSAL XII in Brunei Guest Editors: Johnson Paul and Lucy A. Tedd

Contents 151 Access this journal online 152 Abstracts & keywords 154 Editorial CONSAL XII and the new Secretary General of IFLA Johnson Paul and Lucy A. Tedd 157 Digital library research in the US: an overview with a knowledge management perspective Hsinchun Chen 168 Managing the e-library in a global environment: experiences at Monash University, Australia Chooi Hon Ho 176 Archiving the Web: European experiences Juha Hakala 184 Digital transformation of libraries in Brunei Darussalam: addressing the sustainability issues of VILIS Brunei Haji Suhaimi Bin Haji Abdul Karim 194 Digitisation of collections in Indonesian academic libraries L. Sulistyo-Basuki

201 Copyright, academic research and libraries: balancing the rights of stakeholders in the digital age Shalini R. Urs

News 208 208 208 209 210 212

News from the British Library News from Talis News from Ex Libris News from Innovative News from Endeavor 24 Hour Museum announces Culture Online City Heritage Guides

Reviews 213 Information Representation and Retrieval in the Digital Age Heting Chu Reviewed by Brian Vickery 213 Transforming Serials: The Revolution Continues, Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. 17th Annual Conference, June 20-23, 2002 Edited by Susan L. Scheiberg and Shelley Neville Reviewed by Jane Wainwright

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Contents

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214 The Accidental Webmaster Julie M. Still Reviewed by Phil Bradley 215 The Practical Library Manager Bruce E. Massis Reviewed by Barbara Allan 216 Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval (2nd edition) G.G. Chowdhury Reviewed by Andrew MacFarlane 217 The Accidental Systems Librarian Rachel Singer Gordon Reviewed by Robin Yeates 218 Applied Informetrics for Information Retrieval Research Dietmar Wolfram Reviewed by Gobinda G. Chowdhury 219 Developing Web-based Instruction: Planning, Designing, Managing and Evaluation for Results Edited by Elizabeth A. Dupuis Reviewed by Jane Secker

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Digital Library programmes, a review is provided of significant past and emerging digital library research activities, and research based on new knowledge management concepts and technologies is suggested.

Abstracts & keywords

Managing the e-library in a global environment: experiences at Monash University, Australia Chooi Hon Ho Keywords Digital libraries, Academic libraries, Library management, Australia

CONSAL XII and the new Secretary General of IFLA Johnson Paul and Lucy A. Tedd Keywords Librarians, Conferences, Interviews This editorial provides brief background information on the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians and its twelfth conference which was held in Brunei Darussalam in October 2003. In April 2004 Rasu Ramachandran, who had been Secretary General of CONSAL and the Director of the National Library of Singapore at the time of CONSAL XII, became Secretary General of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and a report of an interview conducted with him prior to taking up his new post is included.

Digital library research in the US: an overview with a knowledge management perspective Hsinchun Chen Keywords Digital libraries, Research, Knowledge management, Government, United States of America The provision of information resources and services is now readily available online via digital libraries furnished by a wide variety of information providers. Information is no longer just text and pictures, and is now available in a wide variety of multimedia formats. Digital libraries represent a new form of information technology in which content management, service delivery and social impact matter as much as technological advancement. In addition, for digital library researchers there is a need to transform information access to knowledge creation and management. Based on research in the USA in the Digital Libraries Initiative and the National Science

Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · Abstracts & keywords q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337

This paper outlines the issues in the management of a virtual library service in a global environment. It focuses on the key initiatives of Monash University Library in Melbourne, Australia in delivering an effective library service to its students in multiple locations both in Australia and overseas in Malaysia and in South Africa. The paper provides brief descriptions of some of the specific e-library services offered to Monash students, including the digitisation of core readings and audio digital recordings of lectures. The paper also provides an insight into planning for the Library’s support of overseas campuses and details the training programme developed for those staff.

Archiving the Web: European experiences Juha Hakala Keywords Archiving, National libraries, Worldwide Web, Finland, Europe Preserving the published cultural heritage of a country is a major concern of any national library, and the challenge of archiving and preserving information published on the Web is great. A short history of Web archiving in Europe from the Swedish Kulturarw3 project to the Nordic Web Archive initiative is provided, together with a generic discussion on the technical challenges of and the solutions developed for Web harvesting and archiving. Experiences from Helsinki University Library in Finland in the use and co-operative development of the NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Library) harvester are given.

Digital transformation of libraries in Brunei Darussalam: addressing the sustainability issues of VILIS Brunei Haji Suhaimi Bin Haji Abdul Karim Keywords Digital libraries, Government, Economics, Brunei, Economic sustainability In Brunei Darussalam the implementation of a technical infrastructure to improve access to the digital world and various e-government initiatives are empowering the country through an informed community and an efficient government. A number

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Abstracts & keywords

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of ICT-related projects have been planned and implemented under the Brunei Economic Development Council and e-government initiatives. Digital libraries and the digital transformation of heritage information have been identified as the most viable areas to be developed in an effort to strengthen the information basis of the community. This paper describes the plans for one important project, the Virtual Library System of Brunei (VILIS Brunei), and outlines the economic sustainability issues being considered.

Catholic Universities in Indonesia) to digitise more than 14,000 documents. The challenges faced in the digitisation of materials in Indonesian libraries are outlined.

Copyright, academic research and libraries: balancing the rights of stakeholders in the digital age Shalini R. Urs Keywords Digital libraries, Copyright law, Intellectual property, Research

Digitisation of collections in Indonesian academic libraries L. Sulistyo-Basuki Keywords Digital libraries, Academic libraries, Indonesia This paper provides an overview of digitised collections within universities in Indonesia, starting from the Ganesha Digital Library Network in 1998, which developed into the Indonesian Digital Libraries Network (IDLN), with 87 private and institutional members. The State Ministry of Research and Technology has distributed document digitising software (Docushare) to universities, and this has been used (for example by the Association of

Following an overview of the historical context of copyright legislation, this paper discusses copyright within the scholarly communication process and the role of libraries in providing access to copyright materials in the digital age. The argument is made that the balance of “rights” and “exceptions” that has been maintained for 300 years needs to be reconsidered for scholarly communications, such as theses and dissertations, as well as for articles in electronic journals. This type of information is factbased, often resulting from public funds, and is part of the intellectual heritage of academic institutions, and so is very different to creative works within the entertainment industries.

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Editorial CONSAL XII and the new Secretary General of IFLA Johnson Paul and Lucy A. Tedd

The authors Johnson Paul is Deputy Director, Information Services, National Library Board of Singapore, and Chief Networking Officer, CONSAL. Lucy A. Tedd is a Lecturer, Department of Information Studies, University of Wales Aberystwyth, UK.

Keywords Librarians, Conferences, Interviews

Abstract This editorial provides brief background information on the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians and its twelfth conference which was held in Brunei Darussalam in October 2003. In April 2004 Rasu Ramachandran, who had been Secretary General of CONSAL and the Director of the National Library of Singapore at the time of CONSAL XII, became Secretary General of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and a report of an interview conducted with him prior to taking up his new post is included.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm

Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 154-156 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337 DOI 10.1108/00330330410547197

The papers included in this issue of Program: electronic library and information systems are all based on presentations given at the XIIth Conference of the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians (CONSAL). We both attended the Conference, which was held in Brunei Darussalam in October 2003 – Johnson as CONSAL administrative support and Lucy, who was very privileged to have been invited to participate, as both a speaker and a facilitator for one of the parallel sessions. CONSAL was founded in 1970 in response to a growing sense of Southeast Asian identity fostered in part by the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The current ten members of CONSAL are Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The main objectives of CONSAL are to establish and strengthen relations among librarians, libraries, library associations and related organisations in the region, to promote co-operation in the fields of librarianship, bibliography, documentation and related activities, as well as to co-operate with other similar regional and international organisations. In a paper on narrowing the “digital divide” in ASEAN countries, Paul (2002) argues that libraries and librarians have an important role to play in this area. The Guide to Regional Intellectual Property Laws for Librarians (Baker and McKenzie, 2002) is an example of a report, produced under the auspices of CONSAL, to help those working in libraries and knowledge centres in the region to understand new and emerging issues in intellectual property rights management. CONSAL holds a conference every three years, hosted by different countries in the region and covering different themes. For example, CONSAL II was held in 1973 in The Philippines and concentrated on Education and Training for Librarianship in Southeast Asia, and CONSAL X was held in Malaysia in 1996 and concentrated on Libraries in National Development. In 2000 the CONSAL Executive Board agreed on the establishment of a Secretariat with a primary role of co-ordinating CONSAL-approved projects. Rasu Ramachandran, Director of the National Library in Singapore, was appointed as the first Secretary General of CONSAL (see www.consal.org). The theme chosen for CONSAL XII was “Information resources empowerment: enhancing knowledge heritage” and its objective, as stated in the conference programme, was to: . highlight the role of library and information professionals in information resources empowerment in the promotion of knowledge heritage;

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share and adopt best practices in library and information towards service excellence and world class collections; and advocate for the effective changes and continuous improvement in libraries and the profession by harnessing the ICT development.

In his opening message, the Director of Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka (the Language and Literature Bureau of the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Sports in Brunei), Awang Haji Abdul Hakim Bin Haji Mohd. Yassin, noted that the theme of CONSAL XII had been chosen by the Organising Committee to “reflect the significance of the transformation of information resources into very vivacious resources that can support the informational needs of the community of stakeholders”. Organising international conferences is a major undertaking and the organising committee of CONSAL XII, originally planned to be held in May 2003, was faced with many extra challenges (including the conflict in the Middle East and the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus in the region) which were quite out of its control and resulted in a delay of five months. The President of the Library Association of Brunei Darussalam, Nellie dato Paduka Haji Sunny, referred to these challenges as she warmly welcomed the hundreds of delegates from ASEAN and non-ASEAN countries including Australia, Bhutan, Canada, China, Finland, India, Japan, New Zealand, the UK and the US to the conference. The programme comprised some 32 presentations in 12 plenary sessions covering a wide range of topics related to the conference theme. There was also opportunity for more specialised discussions in parallel tracks covering relevant issues for national and public libraries, academic libraries, school libraries and archives and special libraries. The exhibition accompanying the conference provided a good opportunity for delegates to find out about recent product developments from companies/information providers such as Thomson ISI, Ebsco, Dynix, ProQuest, Swets Blackwell, Elsevier and Emerald. In addition to the conference “proper”, there was a number of other events. One-day workshops were held before the conference started on issues including: . consortium purchasing of electronic databases; . best practices in Information Literacy programmes; . cataloguing construction and control of Southeast Asian names; . metadata – MARC and its rivals; and . ISBN – practices and perspectives.

Visits to libraries within Brunei, including that of the Universiti Brunei Darussalam (see www.ubd.edu.bn/suppserv/library/index.htm), were also organised. As this editorial is being written in April 2004, just as Rasu Ramachandran, the Secretary General of CONSAL at the time of the conference in Brunei, takes over from Ross Shimmon as Secretary General of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), it seemed fitting to include information from an interview conducted by Johnson with his previous boss. As the Secretary General of CONSAL, Rasu Ramachandran has been responsible for planning, administering and executing programmes and projects in accordance with the objectives of CONSAL. He has also been President of the Library Association of Singapore (LAS) for eight years, Chairman of the National Book Development Council of Singapore (NBDCS) for five years, and has been very active in a number of regional and international organisations. Mr Ramachandran has been the Director of the National Library of Singapore since 1992 and became the Deputy Chief Executive of the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore in 2000. Singapore’s libraries are considered among the best in the region, and the government has recognised the importance of the public library system in contributing to Singapore as a learning nation. Following her attendance at the World Library Summit in Singapore, Lucy reported on her visits to a number of Singaporean libraries (Tedd, 2002). IFLA is an international body founded in Edinburgh in 1927 with the following general aims: . to promote high standards of provision and delivery of library and information services; . to encourage widespread understanding of the value of good library and information services; and . to represent the interests of members throughout the world (see www.ifla.org). IFLA represents approximately 500,000 library professionals from 150 countries. Rasu Ramchandran feels that his 30 years of working within the NLB (or its predecessors) has provided him with valuable all-round experiences. Unlike other library systems, the NLB manages the National Library, the public libraries, school libraries and special libraries in Singapore. It also manages the Singapore Management University library and the Republic Polytechnic library. IFLA membership comprises different types of libraries and his understanding of a whole range of different libraries should help in providing advice and

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direction. Mr Ramachandran’s first-hand experiences in developing Singapore libraries from a third-world status to a first-world library service will also be important in enabling him to understand the issues facing libraries and librarians in developing countries as well as those in developed countries. In particular, his involvement with CONSAL, and his experiences in working with libraries and librarians in developing countries of the region, places him in good standing to take on the position in an organisation whose membership from developing countries is growing. IFLA is increasing the participation of librarians from developing countries and is becoming more democratic and taking steps to become a totally global organisation. Rasu Ramachandran is impressed by the enthusiasm of those who volunteer to become involved in IFLA’s work and who participate in the conference and the work of the various IFLA committees. He notes that:

area which Mr Ramachandran plans to address. Although he is both a visionary and an effective presentator, he sees his role as Secretary General essentially as that of an executor, as IFLA has many fine dreams and visions which have not yet been realised. He is impatient to put them in place after which he says ‘he will dream and envision”. His priorities are: . to build up a strong membership base with particular emphasis to attract younger professionals; . to promote libraries as effective centres for information and knowledge and effective agencies for learning, change and development; . to develop and train librarians as leaders of change; . to develop Library Associations into strong, powerful and effective professional organisations for librarians; and . to increase the sources of funds for IFLA.

IFLA embodies the basic librarian’s core values – freedom of access and to share information fearlessly. It is built on social capital and collective action and I hope to harness the tremendous energy and goodwill of librarians worldwide for positive development of libraries. The library world lacks leadership, though it has leaders. Leading is influencing, guiding a course of action or opinion both at the local level as well as internationally. Information societies await leadership from librarians as knowledge experts and it needs them most now as librarianship has matured and developed and is ready to make a quantum leap forward in enhancing reading, learning and bringing about a more informed society.

IFLA is the most important global voice of librarians, and has promoted libraries as important educational and cultural agencies, providing a useful platform for librarians worldwide to interact and share information. IFLA members have stood together strongly in major international crises to protect access to information and cultural repositories (e.g. in Afghanistan and Iraq). Another key contribution of IFLA is in the development of standards that can then be adopted by librarians all over the world. Making librarians aware of the changes taking place in the library and related environment and providing opportunities to deal with these challenges positively in a globalised environment would be an

On behalf of the readership of Program: electronic library and information systems we wish Mr Ramachandran well in his move from being Secretary General of CONSAL to being Secretary General of IFLA. Selecting papers from a conference such as CONSAL for inclusion in this issue was not easy, and although there were many other interesting papers presented that would also have been worthy of inclusion, we have attempted to choose papers that we believe will be of interest to the wide international readership of this journal. Authors have updated and amended their papers as presented at the conference for publication in this issue. Happy reading!

References Baker and McKenzie (2002), Guide to Regional Intellectual Property Laws for Librarians, National Library Board, Singapore. Paul, J. (2002), “Narrowing the digital divide: initiatives undertaken by the association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN)”, Program, Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 13-22. Tedd, L.A. (2002), “World Library Summit and visits to libraries in Singapore: a report”, Program, Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 253-60.

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1. Introduction

Digital library research in the US: an overview with a knowledge management perspective

The Internet is changing the way we live and do business. Since the first ARPANET node was installed at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) on September 1, 1969 and since the first paper on the Internet (Cerf and Kahn, 1974), the Internet has evolved from a file transfer protocol (ftp), an information gopher service and an e-mail exchange to supporting seamless multimedia content creation, access, and transactions over the Web. Some researchers and practitioners believe that business, technology and society in general are in a true “Digital Renaissance” (Fiorina, 2000). As Hewlett Packard (HP) chief executive officer, Fiorina, put it:

Hsinchun Chen

Like the first Renaissance, which was the liberation of the inventive imagination, the Digital Renaissance is about the empowerment of the individual and the consumer. And if we can bridge the gap between business, science, and government so that we can all understand and foster the Digital Renaissance then we have a chance to make this second Renaissance truly global and grassroots.

The author Hsinchun Chen is McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems and is also Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Hoffman E-commerce Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.

Keywords Digital libraries, Research, Knowledge management, Government, United States of America

Abstract The provision of information resources and services is now readily available online via digital libraries furnished by a wide variety of information providers. Information is no longer just text and pictures, and is now available in a wide variety of multimedia formats. Digital libraries represent a new form of information technology in which content management, service delivery and social impact matter as much as technological advancement. In addition, for digital library researchers there is a need to transform information access to knowledge creation and management. Based on research in the USA in the Digital Libraries Initiative and the National Science Digital Library programmes, a review is provided of significant past and emerging digital library research activities, and research based on new knowledge management concepts and technologies is suggested.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm

Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 157-167 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337 DOI 10.1108/00330330410547205

Using HP as an example, she suggested three emerging forces in the technology and business landscape: (1) information appliances covering anything with a chip inside able to connect to the Internet; (2) always-on IT infrastructure that needs to be as available and reliable as tap water and electricity; and (3) e-services that will take any process or any asset that can be digitised and deliver it over the Web. This viewpoint is frequently echoed by other Internet pioneers such as Cerf. He has been preaching about the next-generation Internet as a medium for Internet-enabled appliances (for example, Internet-enabled automobiles for maintenance and tax collection, Internet-enabled wine corks for ideal storage and drinking conditions and so on), real-time Internet multimedia supports (e.g. Internet multicast video, Internet-enabled Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – call centres, net-based speech recognition, etc.), and even “interplanetary Internet” to support future National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Mars and other planetary explorations, and continuous future data collection and simulation (Burleigh et al., 2003). In spite of such a positive outlook, many researchers and policy makers caution against the Received: 7 January 2004 Revised: 4 March 2004 Accepted: 11 March 2004

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potential pitfalls of technology innovation without careful policy considerations in areas such as privacy/security, cryptography and export, trademarks, domain names and copyright issues, regulatory framework, taxation, liability and dispute resolution, censorship, and digital signatures and certificates, to name but a few outlined by Cerf (2002) in a presentation on digital government and the Internet. While business and technology are in a true Digital Renaissance, we cannot afford to have our whole approach to policy-making remain rooted in the industrial, medieval world. The Internet offers a tremendous opportunity for many different traditional institutions such as libraries, governments, and businesses to deliver better their content and services and interact with their constituents – citizens, patrons, businesses, and other government partners. In addition to providing information, communication, and transaction services, exciting and innovative transformation could occur with new technologies and practices. Data and information can begin to become knowledge assets. Digital library (e-library), digital government (e-government), and e-commerce research have many common threads, yet each faces some unique challenges and opportunities.

primary interface to the Web has evolved from browsing to searching. Millions of people all over the world perform Web searches every day. But the commercial technology of searching large collections has remained largely unchanged from its roots in US government-sponsored research projects of the 1960s. This public awareness of the Web as a critical infrastructure in the 1990s has caused a new revolution in the technologies for information and knowledge management in digital libraries. Digital libraries represent a form of information technology in which social impact matters as much as technological advancement. It is hard to evaluate a new technology, such as digital libraries, in the absence of real users and large collections. The best way to develop effective new systems and services is in multi-year large-scale research projects that use real-world electronic test beds for actual users and aim at developing new, comprehensive, and user-friendly technologies for digital libraries. Typically, these test bed projects should also examine the broad social, economic, legal, ethical and cross-cultural contexts and impacts of digital library development.

2. Digital libraries: an overview of funded projects The location and provision of information services has changed dramatically over the last ten years. There is no need to leave the home or office to locate and access information now readily available online via digital gateways furnished by a wide variety of information providers including libraries, electronic publishers, businesses, organisations and individuals. Information access is no longer restricted to what is physically available in the nearest library. It is electronically accessible from a wide variety of globally distributed information repositories. Information is no longer simply text and pictures. It is available electronically in a wide variety of formats, many of which are large, complex (i.e. video and audio) and often integrated (i.e. multimedia). This increased variety of information allows one to take virtual tours of museums, historical sites and natural wonders, attend virtual concerts and theatre performances, watch a variety of movies, and read, view or listen to books, articles, lectures and music, all through digital libraries. The Web has made access to the Internet part of everyday life, and over the past few years, the

2.1 Digital Library Initiative, 1994-1998 The original Digital Library Initiative (DLI or DLI-1) in the USA, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA, began in 1994. The original programme announcement stated: The Initiative’s focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks – all in user-friendly ways. Digital libraries basically store materials in electronic format and manipulate large collections of those materials effectively. Research into digital libraries is research into network information systems, concentrating on how to develop the necessary infrastructure to effectively mass-manipulate the information on the Net. The key technical issues are how to search and display desired selections from and across large collections (see www.dli2. nsf.gov/dlione/).

After a competitive proposal solicitation and review process, six large-scale projects ($4 million per project on average) were selected. Most projects were technical in nature, were led by reputable computer scientists, and consisted of a strong team of computer, information and library science researchers, sociologists, and content specialists (see www.dli2.nsf.gov/dlione/). The six projects are listed below: (1) The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign’s (UIUC) Interspace Project was

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(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

led by Schatz and focused on federating repositories of scientific literature using SGML. Co-principal investigator (PI) Chen, of the University of Arizona, was responsible for the semantic federation and retrieval component. The Software Development Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which had developed the Mosaic Browser in 1992, was responsible for the server architecture and system interface. Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Informedia Project was led by Wactlar and researched the topics of multimedia digital video library and retrieval using speech recognition, image/film segmentation, and text retrieval techniques. The Stanford University Infobus Project was led by Garcia-Molina, and its aim was to develop interoperation mechanisms among heterogeneous digital library services. The now popular Google search engine was one of the significant derivatives from the project. The University of California at Berkeley (UCB) project was led by Wilensky, and researched topics on environmental planning and geographic information systems (GIS). The Alexandria Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) was led by Smith, and focused on providing access to spatially referenced map information. The University of Michigan project was led by Atkins, and focused on intelligent agents for information location.

February 1999 IEEE Computer issue, edited by the same guest editors, focused on practical outcomes from major DLI and non-DLI research projects, both in the US and internationally (Schatz and Chen, 1999). Truly it was an exciting, pioneering time for digital library research. 2.2 DLI-2 and other projects, 1999The excitement of Internet-enabled IT developments and e-commerce opportunities in the 1990s prompted the US Government to examine the role of IT research for long-term US interest. A President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) was formed, which included many leading US IT researchers and practitioners. Digital library research was identified as one of the successful federal research programmes and a future target research area. The PITAC report concluded:

The DLI projects were extremely successful for several reasons. Each research team consisted of technologists, sociologists, and content specialists who worked closely together for a long period of time. The research programme was funded jointly by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA and had significant, hands-on project monitoring and involvement from all three agencies. The biannual project site visits and all-PI meetings supported intellectual communication and scholarship exchange among researchers. A new digital library community took shape. Many interesting technical advancements in areas such as semantic retrieval, video retrieval, geospatial access, search engines, and system interoperability were developed. The DLI research results were also reported in many digital library related conferences, books, book chapters, and papers. For example, the May 1996 issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE’s) Computer magazine was a special issue, edited by Schatz and Chen, that focused on DLI with reports from each of the projects at the halfway point in the initiative (Schatz and Chen, 1996). The

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Vigorous information technology research and development (R&D) is essential for achieving America’s 21st century aspirations. The technical advances that led to today’s information tools, such as electronic computers and the Internet, began with Federal Government support of research in partnership with industry and universities. These innovations depended on patient investment in fundamental and applied research. We have had a spectacular return on that Federal research investment. Businesses that produce computers, semiconductors, software, and communications equipment have accounted for a third of the total growth in US economic production since 1992, creating millions of highpaying new jobs. Government-sponsored university research programs have supported graduate education for many of the leaders and innovators in the field. As we approach the 21st century, the opportunities for innovation in information technology are larger than they have ever been – and more important. We have an essential national interest in ensuring a continued flow of good new ideas and trained professionals in information technology. After careful review of the Federal programs this Committee has concluded that Federal support for research in information technology is seriously inadequate. Research programs intended to maintain the flow of new ideas in information technology and to train the next generation of researchers are funding only a small fraction of the research that is needed, turning away large numbers of excellent proposals. Compounding this problem, Federal agency managers are faced with insufficient resources to meet all research needs and have naturally favored research supporting the short-term goals of their missions over long-term high-risk investigations. While this is undoubtedly the correct local decision for each agency, the sum of such decisions threatens the long-term welfare of the nation. The Nation needs significant new research on computing and communication systems. This

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research will help sustain the economic boom in information technology, address important societal problems such as education and crisis management, and protect us from catastrophic failures of the complex systems that now underpin our transportation, defense, business, finance, and healthcare infrastructures. If the results are to be available when needed, we must act now to reinvigorate the long-term IT research endeavor and to revitalize the computing infrastructure at university campuses and other civilian research facilities, which are rapidly falling behind the state of the art. If we do not take these steps, the flow of ideas that have fueled the information revolution over the past decades may slow to a trickle in the next. To address these problems, the Committee estimated in its Interim report in August 1998 that the Federal government should increase its support for information technology research by a billion dollars per year by FY 2004. Since that time the Committee has sought comments from the community regarding its preliminary findings and recommendations, and convened several panels to review those recommendations. This effort produced a more detailed model for the costs of the research programs and other activities needed to address the problems identified in our report (see www.hpcc.gov/pitac/report/exec_summary.html).

specialty communities and engage scholars, practitioners and learners in not only science and engineering but also arts and humanities. DLI-2 recognizes that knowledge access is inherently international and will actively promote activities and processes that bridge political and language boundaries, including funding through a new program in International Digital Libraries.

In particular, the sponsoring agencies provided examples of research areas (see www.nsf.gov/pubs/ 1998/nsf9863/nsf9863.htm) in the categories identified which included: (1) Human-centred systems: . Methods, algorithms, and software leading to wide-spectrum information discovery, search, retrieval, manipulation and presentation capabilities:

The success of the original DLI programme and the continued IT research interest as stated in the PITAC report allowed the NSF to continue to spearhead the development of the DLI Phase 2 (DLI-2) research programme (see www.dli2.nsf.gov/). More sponsor agencies joined DARPA, NASA and the NSF in the DLI-2 programme, including the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Library of Congress (LOC), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Smithsonian Institution (SI), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). DLI-2 supported a broader range of activities than the first DLI, including small projects and humanities topics. There is an even stronger emphasis on working test beds with real users and real collections. As the NSF DLI-1 and DLI-2 Program Director, Griffin, explains (Schatz and Chen, 1999): The Digital Libraries Initiative-Phase 2 (DLI-2) supported by NSF, DARPA, NLM, LOC, NEH, NASA and other agency partners will address a refined technology research agenda and look to support new areas and dimensions in the digital libraries information lifecycle including content creation, access, use and usability, preservation and archiving. DLI-2 will look to create domain applications and operational infrastructure, and understand their use and usability in various organizational, economic, social, international contexts – in short, digital libraries as humancentered systems. DLI-2 involvement will extend far beyond computing and communications

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– software tools and toolkits; – browsing and navigation software for large and diverse information spaces; – intelligent search of image/video types by content, structure and context; – semantic search and retrieval theories and models; – multilingual information access and cross-lingual data services; and

.

– advanced software for searching, filtering, abstracting and summarising large volumes of data, imagery, and other kinds of information. Intelligent user interfaces: – user/system learning and adaptation processes associated with interactive use; – autonomous intelligent agents to support human needs; and

. .

.

.

– information presentation and visualisation. Collaboration technologies and tools. User and usability studies, including human-computer interaction, humanmediated communication and users and institutions with special needs. Use in education, learning and capacity building, especially in new and naı¨ve user communities. Economic and social implications: – social science research and humanities research applied to distributed networked information environments and contexts; – social informatics; – nature and services of libraries, universities, schools and other institutions in the transition to widespread use of digital media;

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– knowledge acquisition, organisation, dissemination and use practised by individuals and user communities;

– new resources for science, mathematics and engineering education at all levels; – interactive educational tools and interfaces appropriate for different groups of users;

– factors determining usage, public acceptance and investment in digital libraries; and – means and media for advancing scholarly communication. (2) Content and collections-based research: . Efficient data capture, representation, preservation and archiving: – novel digital representations of text and non-text media and derivatives; – intelligent systems and algorithms for indexing, abstracting, interpreting, classifying and cataloguing; – content-based image recognition, analysis and classification; – intelligent text processing and document management; natural language analysis for data extraction and for structure and topical segmentation; – alternative document and text mark-up systems, structuring principles and distributed management models; – structuring and linking of information objects and documents; and

.

– cost-effective methods for creating and converting digital objects. Metadata: – means and methods for preserving and presenting context for data elements and collections; and

. . .

– metadata types and standards development. Interoperability of content and collections. Domain-specific information objects. Technologies, methods and processes for addressing societal, economic and legal issues associated with the creation and use of digital collections: – intellectual property and rights management; – privacy and security; – publishing in a digital environment; – charging mechanisms for copyright documents; and

.

.

– creation of learning environments. (3) Systems-centred research: . Open, networked architectures for new information environments capable of supporting complex information access and analysis and collaborative work. . Systems scalability, federation, extensibility and composability. . Intelligent agents. . Interoperability. . Networking, communications and middleware research topics relevant to digital libraries including new approaches and protocols for high bandwidth applications; metadata services; reliability and integrity of services; quality of service and payment models and issues. . Advanced multimedia information capture, representation and digitisation. . Systems evaluation and performance studies. (4) Development of digital library test beds: . Integration of functional components into useful systems to serve specific domain communities and identifying unique information requirements, technical and design issues, and metrics of performance and utility. . Applications that enhance the general functionality of existing and future digital libraries by providing new concepts and tools for example for document mark-up, image and video management, semantic encoding, metadata, intelligent search and retrieval, and federation of existing and new digital collections. . Specialised digital libraries applications designed for specific knowledge domains and communities (defence, geosciences, physical sciences, biological sciences, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities, etc.). . Improving processes which support education, learning, scholarly communication and collaboration: – new types of digital collections;

– authentication and copyright protection. New economic and business models corresponding to new electronic media. Development and access to educational materials and approaches including:

– electronic journals, textbooks, catalogues; and – new means for gathering, aggregating and establishing relationships among knowledge sources.

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.

High-risk, “breakthrough” applications capable of providing new conceptual paradigms for information technologies and altering social and work practices on a grand scale: – distributed knowledge-work environments; – online educational and cultural resources in the form of virtual classrooms, museums, concert halls, theatres, galleries, studios suited to a broad audience; – multilingual, global-scale knowledge repositories; and – multimodal access supporting information needs of mobile individuals whose primary attention is directed elsewhere.

DLI-2 funded 29 research projects, with an additional nine projects having an undergraduate emphasis (see www.dli2.nsf.gov/projects.html). Nine projects were large in scope and funding ($2m+, mostly over four to five years). Among them, Stanford, UCB, UCSB and CMU were original DLI-1 recipients and their research topics are extensions of their original works, e.g. UCSB for a digital earth prototype, CMU for video summarisation and visualisation, Stanford for interoperability technologies, and UCB for scholarly information dissemination and use. A few new large-scale projects began to explore other unique digital library applications (e.g. Columbia University’s patent-case digital library, Harvard University’s social science digital library, Indiana University’s digital music library, Tufts University’s humanities digital library, and Michigan State University’s national gallery of the spoken word). Similar to the DLI-1 projects, most of these large-scale projects involve a team of technologists, sociologists, and content specialists for a non-trivial domain or application. Most of the smaller DLI-2 projects are either technology-focused (e.g. the University of Arizona’s high-performance digital library classification system) or domain-specific (e.g. the University of Hawaii’s Shuhai Wenyuan classical Chinese digital library). An additional 15 projects have been funded since 1999 under the Information Technology Research (ITR) programme (see www.dli2.nsf.gov/itrprojects.html). Some address language (e.g. CMU’s AVENUE project for adaptive voice translation for minority languages) and 3D modelling topics (e.g. Columbia’s project for modelling, visualising and analysing historical and archaeological sites), others research topics in law enforcement information sharing and

knowledge management (University of Arizona’s COPLINK agent project) and multilingual access to large spoken archives (Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a $7.5m project, 2001-2006). In addition to the core DLI-2 and related ITR projects, DLI-2 also sponsors 12 international digital library projects (see www.dli2.nsf.gov/ intl.html) involving partners from the UK (e.g. University of Liverpool, Southampton University, King’s College London), Germany (University Library of Go¨ttingen, University of Trier), China (Tsinghua University), Taiwan (National Taiwan University), Japan (National Institute for Informatics), and Africa (West African Research Centre). Although most projects are of limited budget ($400k) and scope, international projects face unique logistics and collaboration challenges. Due to the large number of agencies and research projects involved, DLI-2 and the related ITR research programme elected a more free-form annual all-PI meeting format that often co-occurred with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries ( JCDL). Although most all-PI meetings involved only traditional lecture-style project presentations, the diversity of digital library research increased significantly in these DLI-2 and ITR projects. Several partnership agencies also began to develop digital library projects that are uniquely tailored to their institution’s function. For example, the IMLS, which is an independent federal agency that fosters leadership, innovation and lifelong learning, supports a series of 130-plus smaller-scale digital project grants to libraries and museums for research, digitisation, and management of digital resources (see www.imls.gov/closer/cls_po.asp), from Brooklyn’s Children’s Museum to the Chicago Academy of Sciences, and from Duke University’s library to the Georgia Department of Archives and History. IMLS is the only federal agency with statutory authority to support digitisation. IMLS grants address critical challenges of preservation, interoperability, and user impact, in addition to supporting the creation of rich digital content. Another significant digital library research programme that was developed concurrently under the NSF was the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Digital Library (NSDL; see http://nsdl.org). The NSDL offers, via the Internet, high-quality materials for science, mathematics, engineering and technology education. It will strongly affect education at all levels, including pre-kindergarten to grade 12, undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong learning, by providing any time/anywhere access to a rich array of authoritative and reliable interactive materials and learning environments. More than 60 projects have been funded since 1998 in three areas:

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(1) the collection track for offering contents (e.g. national biology digital library, digital mathematics library, experimental economics digital library); (2) the service track for providing technologies and services (e.g. University of Arizona’s GetSmart e-learning concept map system); and (3) the core integration track, for linking all contents and services under a unified framework.

international conferences on digital libraries have proliferated from their roots in the ACM and IEEE Digital Conferences (and then the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL) to a European version (the European Conference on Digital Libraries; ECDL) and an Asian version (the International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries; ICADL). ICADL, for instance, has evolved from its modest inception of about 80 participants in Hong Kong in 1998 to 150 participants in Taipei, Taiwan in 1999, to 300 participants in Seoul, Korea in 2000 and to 600 participants from 13 countries in Bangalore, India in 2001. Even regional digital library conferences, such as the First China Digital Library Conference, hosted by the National Library of China and held in Beijing in 2002, drew 450 participants from 18 countries, and 125 exhibitors. Such a high level of activity is due to continuous interest among digital library researchers and practitioners internationally. Partially, this is also due to the exponential growth of information content on the Web around the globe, which Web searchers are failing to handle successfully. Table I summarises a selection of the milestones in digital library research and development since 1994.

Open Archive Initiative (OAI) based content creation and metadata harvesting is one of the critical components in NSDL, which has the potential for improving the standards and sustainability of all projects involved. The NSDL programme takes a grass-roots approach to inviting community input and consensus building through various committees and working groups. Significant process and sustainability issues have been carefully considered in this programme. The first release of the NSDL was in Fall 2002, and Figure 1 shows its homepage.

2.3 International conferences on digital libraries 1995Digital libraries have become far more important nationally and internationally in 2004 than they were in 1996. Many new and significant national digital library initiatives have emerged. In addition,

2.4 Digital library challenges Unlike digital government or e-commerce, digital library researchers face some unique challenges, some of which are listed below.

Figure 1 Homepage of NSDL

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Table I Major digital library research and development milestones Year

Milestone

1994

NSF Digital Library Initiative Phase 1 The First Annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, College Station, Texas First IEEE Advances in Digital Libraries Conference, McClean, Virginia First ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, Bethesda, Maryland IEEE Computer DLI Special Issue First European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), Pisa, Italy The First International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL), Hong Kong, China President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee Report NSF Digital Library Initiative Phase 2 (DLI-2) NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) Programme Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Programme NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Digital Library (NSDL) Programme First ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Roanoke, Virginia JCDL 2004, Tucson, Arizona

1995 1996

1997 1998 1999

2001 2004

.

.

.

.

Cultural and historical heritage. Many digital library and museum collections contain artefacts that are fragile, precious, and of historical significance. Many different countries are quickly moving towards digitising their unique cultural and historical collections. However, the selection and digitisation process has not been easy, both for technical, organisational, and economic reasons. Heterogeneity of content and media types. Digital library collections have a wide range of content and media types, ranging from 3D chemical structures to tornado simulation models, from the statue of David to paintings by Van Gogh. A mix of text, audio, and video is common. Collection, organisation, indexing, searching, and analysis of such diverse information content continues to create unique technical challenges. Intellectual property issues. Unlike digital government or e-commerce applications that often generate their own content, digital libraries provide content management and retrieval services to many other content owners. The intellectual property issues (rights and fee collection) surrounding such diverse collections need to be addressed. Cost and sustainability issues. Many patrons would often like library services to be “free”, or at least extremely affordable.

.

Compounding the issue further is the notion of “free” Internet content. However, for highquality, credible content to be accessible through digital libraries, cost and sustainability problems needed to be resolved. Different digital library pricing models would need to be developed for different contents and services. Universal access and international collaboration. Digital library content is often of interest not just to people in one region, but possibly all over the world. Many content creation and development processes also require collaboration among researchers and librarians in different parts of the world. Digital library researchers are facing the unique challenge of creating a global service that bridges cultural and language barriers.

3. Trailblazing a path towards knowledge and transformation Based on experiences gained through the DLI and DLI-2 projects, it is our belief that digital libraries require a switch of focus from simple data organisation and information access to the more important process of knowledge creation, management and sharing. It is well recognised that “knowledge is power”, but not data or information (which creates “data/information overload”). We also believe that a fundamental “transformation” is required of institutions to adopt new technologies and the associated processes, instead of relying only on technologies to provide information, communication and transactions over the Internet.

3.1 Data, information, and knowledge It is generally agreed by IT practitioners that a continuum of data, information, and knowledge (and even wisdom) exists within any enterprise. The concept of data and the systems to manage them began to be popular in the 1980s. Data are mostly structured, factual, and often numeric. They often exist as business transactions in database management systems (DBMS) such as Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL. Information, on the other hand, became a hot item for businesses in the 1990s, especially after the explosion of the Web and the successes of many search engines. Information is factual, but unstructured, and in many cases textual. Web pages and e-mail are good examples of “information” that often exists in search engines, portals, groupware, and document management systems. Information is often used to support business decisions. Knowledge is inferential, abstract, and is often needed to make business decisions.

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In addition to the IT view of the datainformation-knowledge continuum, other researchers have taken a more academic view. According to these researchers, data consist of facts, images, or sounds. When data are combined with interpretation and meaning, information emerges. Information is formatted, filtered and summarised data that, when combined with action and application, becomes knowledge. Knowledge exists in forms such as instincts, ideas, rules and procedures that guide actions and decisions. This can be represented in tabular form, as shown in Table II as a data, information and knowledge pyramid. The concept of knowledge has become prevalent in many disciplines and business practices. For example, information scientists consider taxonomies, subject headings, and classification schemes as representations of knowledge. Artificial intelligence researchers have long been seeking such ways to represent human knowledge as semantic nets, logic, production systems and frames. Consulting firms have also been actively promoting practices and methodologies to capture corporate knowledge assets and organisational memory. Since the 1990s, knowledge management has become a popular term that appears in many applications, from digital libraries to search engines, and from data mining to text mining. Despite its apparent popularity, we believe the field is rather disjointed and new knowledge management technologies are relatively foreign to practitioners. For a more indepth review of knowledge management related research and techniques, readers are referred to Chen (2002). The NSDL, as described earlier, is an example of a digital library as applied in education. As part of the NSDL project the GetSmart system is being created to apply knowledge management techniques in a learning environment. Researchers reported at the JCDL 2003 on experimenting with the system with students at the University of Arizona and at Virginia Polytechnic (Marshall et al., 2003). For digital library researchers, there is a need to transform information access into knowledge creation. Instead of serving as information providers, digital libraries could become knowledge repositories by effectively categorising,

analysing and organising the contents of digital libraries. Ontology creation, automatic thesaurus or subject headings generation, knowledge map development, and user modelling are all areas that could allow digital libraries to provide more personalised and useful services, and thus form part of the digital library research programme outlined earlier.

3.2 Information-communication-transaction transformation: digital library, digital government and e-commerce The Internet delivers library, business, and government content and services with different levels of interaction (Elmagarmid and McIver, 2001). Digital libraries, digital government (or e-government) and e-commerce share many common challenges and opportunities. At the lowest level, library, government or business “information” is created, categorised and indexed and delivered to its target audiences through the Internet. Digital library services exhibit this characteristic most strongly. Metadata, data consolidation, content quality and system interfaces are the most critical issues under consideration. Most early government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-business (G2B) services also belong to this category, in which governments merely act as information providers and do not provide a two-way communication channel connecting them with citizens or businesses. Many business portals (business-tocitizen (B2C)) also serve to convey their product and service information through the Web. For digital government and e-commerce researchers and practitioners, there is much to learn from the content creation, management, organisation, searching and analysis experience of digital library researchers. At the next level, e-services support two-way “communication”, whereby patrons, customers or citizens can communicate their needs or requests through Web forms, e-mail or other Internet media. Many early B2C, G2C and G2B applications quickly evolved into providers of such communication services by adding simple Webbased groupware functionalities such as Web forums, e-mail, bulletin boards, chat rooms, etc.

Table II The data-information-knowledge pyramid Layers

Characteristics

Systems

Knowledge

Instincts, ideas, rules, procedures Actions and decisions Formatted, filtered, summarised Unstructured, textual Facts, images, sounds Factual, structured, numeric

Knowledge portal data, text, Web mining

Information Data

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Search engine, portal, e-mail, groupware Database management systems

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Computer-supported collaborative systems (or groupware) and recommender systems can significantly improve communication services for all digital library, digital government and e-commerce applications. Some of these systems have only begun to emerge recently. We believe groupware-based technologies have a tremendous potential for helping digital library, government and e-commerce researchers and practitioners better understand their targeted customers or citizens and deliver more customised services. At the third level, “transaction” services for patrons, citizens and businesses are supported. Many businesses support transactions among their suppliers (business-to-business (B2B)) or customers (B2C) through enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management systems. Various government departments or branches also use the Internet for transactions among themselves. Many of the more advanced G2C, G2B and government-to-government (G2G) digital government applications also belong to this category. Income tax filing, withholding and returns (for citizens and businesses), municipal service requests and tracking, business licence applications and payments, etc. constitute egovernment transactions that can be conducted over the Internet. E-commerce researchers and practitioners clearly have the most experience in this area. Most e-consumer services provide seamless (e.g. “one-click” service) e-transactions. Similarly, most within-business (e.g. ERP-type) and between-business (e.g. SCM-type) e-commerce enterprise systems and services support complete process integration and transactions. However, significant adaptation needs to be done before such e-commerce systems become practical and cost-effective for other noncommercial applications. At the fourth and highest level, we believe there is an opportunity for the “transformation” of practices and services delivered by libraries, government agencies and businesses. Digital libraries have allowed traditional libraries to re-examine their content management and service delivery assumptions and practices. Many leading

information and library science departments are also re-structuring their curriculum to take advantage of the abundant opportunities presented to the new generation of Internet information specialists. Business consulting professionals are creating new methodologies and best practices to take advantage of the new business opportunities. E-voting and e-politics are examples of e-government applications that may significantly alter the conducting of democratic voting and political processes. In the law enforcement and litigation support area, new database and data mining technologies could become the catalyst for encouraging information sharing, supporting collaboration and investigation among police departments, corrections offices, social services and courts (Hauck and Chen, 1999). The informationcommunication-transaction-transformation pyramid is shown in tabular form in Table III. By transforming enterprise-specific data and information into knowledge that could be used to support fundamental transformation of processes and practices, we believe Internet-enabled IT and knowledge management could become the catalyst for innovation in digital libraries, and possibly also for digital government and e-commerce.

4. The future With unique challenges facing digital libraries, we foresee many active and high-impact research opportunities for researchers in information science, library science, computer science, public policy and management information systems. Digital library researchers are well positioned to become the “agents of transformation” for the new Net of the twenty-first century. We believe information technologies such as the Internet, the Web, data mining, knowledge portals, recommender systems and visualisation are best considered as the “catalysts” for creating a human-driven, system-assisted transformation process rather than as “silver bullets” for solving an institution’s basic problems. IT cannot be

Table III The information-communication-transaction-transformation pyramid Layers

Characteristics

Systems

Transformations

Digital library, e-government, e-commerce

Communication

New practices, services IT-enhanced, knowledge-based culture Transactions based Process integration Interactive, collaborative, two-way communication

Information

Metadata, content creation, one-way communication

Transaction

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E-commerce B2B, B2C, ERP, SCM, CRM E-government G2C, G2B, B2C, groupware Digital library B2C, G2C, search engine

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effective if it is not implemented and utilised properly by its owners and users, and without considering its larger organisational and social context. Over the past decade, we have seen many excellent examples of fundamental transformations occurring in many organisations with the help of new IT deployment, from e-commerce to digital libraries. We hope that IT professionals and information science practitioners will embrace the IT challenges (and the associated opportunities) and consider leading activities in “trailblazing a path towards knowledge and transformation” in their own organisations.

Marshall, B., Zhang, Y., Chen, H., Lally, A., Shen, R., Fox, E. and Cassel, L. (2003), “Convergence of knowledge management and e-learning: the GetSmart experience”, Proceedings of the Third Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, available at: http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/go/ intranet/Publication/JCDL-2003-Marshall.pdf Schatz, B.R. and Chen, H. (1996), “Building large-scale digital libraries”, IEEE Computer, Vol. 29 No. 5, pp. 22-7, available at: http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/co/1996/ 05/r5toc.htm (accessed 6 April 2004). Schatz, B.R. and Chen, H. (1999), “Digital libraries: technological advancements and social impacts”, IEEE Computer, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 45-50.

References

Further reading

Burleigh, S., Cerf, V., Durk, R., Fall, K., Hooke, A., Scott, K. and Weiss, H. (2003), “The interplanetary Internet: a communications structure for Mars exploration”, Acta Astronautica, Vol. 53 No. 4-10, pp. 365-73. Cerf, V. (2002), “Digital government and the Internet”, National Conference on Digital Library Research, Los Angeles, CA, 20 May, available at: www.diggov.org/archive/library/pdf/ cerf.pdf (accessed 6 April 2004). Cerf, V. and Kahn, R.E. (1974), “Protocol for packet network intercommunication”, IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 22 No. 5, pp. 637-48. Chen, H. (2002), Knowledge Management Systems: A Text Mining Perspective, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Elmagarmid, A.K. and McIver, W.J. Jr (2001), “The ongoing march toward digital government”, IEEE Computer, Vol. 34 No. 2, pp. 32-8. Fiorina, C. (2000), “The world stands at the threshold of a digital renaissance”, paper presented at the Aspen Summit 2000: Cyberspace and the American Dream VII, available at: www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/speeches/fiorina/ ceo_aspen_00.html (accessed 6 April 2004). Hauck, R.V. and Chen, H. (1999), “COPLINK: a case of intelligent analysis and knowledge management”, Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Information Systems ’99, Association for Information Systems, Atlanta, GA, pp. 15-28.

Atabakhsh, H., Schroeder, J., Chen, H., Chau, M., Xu, J., Zhang, J. and Bi, H. (2001), “COPLINK knowledge management for law enforcement: text analysis, visualization and collaboration”, paper presented at the National Conference on Digital Government, May 21-23, Los Angeles, CA, available at: http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/ COPLINK/publications/posterDG20012.pdf (accessed 6 April 2004). Chen, H., Houston, A.L., Sewell, R.R. and Schatz, B.R. (1998), “Internet browsing and searching: user evaluation of category map and concept space techniques”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 49 No. 7, pp. 582-603. Chen, H., Schroeder, J., Hauck, R.V., Ridgeway, L., Atabakhsh, H., Gupta, H., Boarman, C., Rasmussen, K. and Clements, A.W. (2003), “COPLINK Connect: information and knowledge management for law enforcement”, Decision Support Systems, Vol. 34 No. 3, pp. 271-85. National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (2002), Information Technology Research, Innovation, and E-Government, National Academy Press, Washington, DC. Salton, G. (1989), Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis and Retrieval of Information by Computer, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

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1. Introduction

Managing the e-library in a global environment: experiences at Monash University, Australia Chooi Hon Ho

The author Chooi Hon Ho is Director, Corporate Services and International Development, Monash University Library, Melbourne, Australia.

Keywords Digital libraries, Academic libraries, Library management, Australia

Abstract This paper outlines the issues in the management of a virtual library service in a global environment. It focuses on the key initiatives of Monash University Library in Melbourne, Australia in delivering an effective library service to its students in multiple locations both in Australia and overseas in Malaysia and in South Africa. The paper provides brief descriptions of some of the specific e-library services offered to Monash students, including the digitisation of core readings and audio digital recordings of lectures. The paper also provides an insight into planning for the Library’s support of overseas campuses and details the training programme developed for those staff.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm

Monash University Library is one of the key academic libraries in Australia. It comprises eight libraries in Australia and two overseas campuses in Malaysia and South Africa. The Library services approximately 50,000 students and 5,000 staff located in the faculties and administrative units of the University. The Library has more than 250 staff. The Library’s collection includes over 2.8 million items with access to over 440 networked electronic databases, 140,000 e-books and over 20,000 electronic journal subscriptions across all campuses within Australia and internationally. The homepage for the Library (see www.lib.monash.edu.au/) is shown in Figure 1. In recent years, Monash University has placed increasing emphasis on flexible learning, and has made rapid strides in its global operations. The Off-Campus Directional Statement for Monash issued in November 2000 highlighted the opportunity for the University to achieve substantial growth in the area of off-campus delivery, and stressed the need for appropriate investment and strategic leadership in this critical component of the University’s development. The following year, the University introduced a major learning and teaching initiative entitled the Global Online Learning Development (GOLD) Programme. The University acknowledged that implementation of the GOLD programme would require the development of ancillary, administrative and support systems, and would include library services. The Library had to ensure that there was an appropriate infrastructure to deliver an effective service to the total student population – whether they be on campus, off campus, mixed mode, or offshore students. Offshore students are defined as those students enrolled in Monash off-campus learning courses offered in collaboration with overseas local partner organisations (i.e. transnational courses).

2. Supporting flexible delivery of teaching and learning programmes Monash University Library’s principal mission is to support the learning, teaching, research and community programmes of the University by providing seamless and timely access to highquality scholarly information and learning

Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 168-175 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337 DOI 10.1108/00330330410547214

Received: 2 February 2004 Revised: 29 March 2004 Accepted: 2 April 2004 All URLs in this paper were checked on 6 April 2004.

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Figure 1 Homepage of Monash University Library

materials to meet the needs of the staff and students in the whole of Monash. The University’s shift to online teaching has had a significant impact on the Library on several fronts: . requirement for reliable and efficient communication networks; . management of parallel services of print-based and electronic operations; and . changing role of the librarians as facilitators of the increasing array of electronic information resources to the teachers and students. To support the University’s mission, the Library has had to re-align its priorities and make adjustments in its infrastructure. The Library’s planning and decision-making processes had to take into account the requirements for offshore students to access appropriate library resources and services. In order to cope with the multiple locations and cross-campus responsibilities, the Library adapted a matrix organisation structure whereby managers had multiple functional reporting lines. The distance education unit evolved into a more generic, flexible library service infrastructure. Adjustments had to be made in the organisation and committee structure to accommodate the cross-campus responsibilities of

the Library’s telephone service and the online library enquiry service, eQuery. The centralised Document Delivery Unit extended its service beyond the regular on-campus students and streamlined services to off-campus and offshore students where appropriate. The Library’s matrix organisation structure was supported by several information and resources committees with representation across departments and campuses. Top priority was given to developing strategies and systems that would maximise access by students and staff to the Library’s information resources and services. Rapid advances in ICT and the huge increase in digital information has enabled the Library to improve its range of services to its remote clients in the following ways: The Library worked closely with the University’s Information Technology Services Division to develop a programme that allowed authenticated users, regardless of location, to access the library’s databases. Control of access to the Library’s electronic resources is by means of an authenticated password that is provided to all Monash enrolled students and staff in Australia and abroad. There has been a significant shift in the Library’s collection development policies to

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increase the range and number of electronic resources, whether these are electronic databases, full-text journals, or electronic books. A major Library initiative was the establishment of the Digitisation Centre to digitise course materials provided by the academics for the Library’s electronic reserve collection. The need to include remote users in the planning of library services is considered at all stages of library processes including licence negotiations, user education guides, and renewal of journal subscriptions. The Library’s Strategic Plan has been developed to reflect the University’s planned development of courses and research across campuses and across continents.

3. Library strategies towards a virtual library service To support the University’s increasing emphasis on global and flexible delivery of teaching and learning programmes, Monash University Library decided that a Web-based strategy would be the most cost-effective means to deliver its services to all Monash students across buildings, campuses and countries. The Voyager library catalogue, a state-of-the-art Web-based integrated management system, is the key means to access online resources. It contains thousands of links to databases, online e-books, e-journals, articles, and Web sites. The following is a summary of the Library’s key initiatives. 3.1 Databases and electronic resources For ease of reference the Library’s databases are listed by subject disciplines with links to specially created subject pages and electronic databases and Web sites (see www.lib.monash.edu.au/databases). Figure 2 shows a screenshot of some of the electronic resources available in architecture. The Library Electronic Journals page lists the key journals subscribed to by the Library by broad subject disciplines. These lists are produced automatically from the Monash Voyager Catalogue. 3.2 Electronic reserve The amount of reading material available to students electronically is maximised through the electronic readings and reserve service (see www.lib.monash.edu.au/services/teaching.html/). Accessed through the Voyager catalogue, the electronic reading lists link to: . full-text articles sourced from an electronic journal or database; . scanned items prepared by the Digitisation Centre;

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the Library catalogue showing the loan status of a book; and Web addresses supplied by the course lecturer.

ccess to digitised full-text journal articles and chapters in books is made available to all Monash students, both on-campus and off-campus. The service has been extended to obtain articles to support student reading at Monash Malaysia and Monash South Africa. A major advantage is the capability to cope with multiple users at any one time. In 2002, there were approximately 30,000 accesses per week. Examples of some of the online readings available for students of child development are shown in Figure 3. 3.3 Digitisation Centre In 2001, the Library established the Digitisation Centre to make licensed digital reproductions of reasonable portions of copyright-protected works, as per the remuneration agreement between the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC), the Copyright Agency Ltd in Australia and the Copyright Act of 1968. These reproductions are made on behalf of Monash University teaching staff to support their delivery of teaching materials in a flexible mode. All digitised materials are linked to the Voyager catalogue. 3.4 Monash Exam Paper database The Monash Exam Paper database provides easy access to past Monash examination papers from 1993 onwards (see http://exams.lib.monash.edu. au). Access can be by course code or subject discipline. This database is extremely popular with the students. In 2002, there were more than 1.3 million hits. 3.5 Monash Lectures Online (MLO) Monash Lectures Online delivers digital audio recordings of lectures to Monash students via the Internet (http://audio.monash.edu.au/mlo/). The recorded lectures can be accessed from personal computers within the Library, or off-campus. Recordings are available within minutes of the conclusion of the lecture. In 2002, more than 5,000 hours of audio recordings involving 130 subjects per semester were produced. 3.6 Virtual Librarian The Virtual Librarian provides online access to instructions on how to find information and in the use of various library tools (see www.lib.monash. edu.au/vl/). This online service, as shown in Figure 4, provides online tutorials in a wide range of subjects. Some tutorials were also prepared for global use by students at the campuses in Malaysia and South Africa.

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Figure 2 Some of the electronic resources available in the field of architecture

3.7 eQuery eQuery is an e-mail reference service available to all Monash students, including remote students, seven days a week (see www.lib.monash.edu.au/ forms/equery.html). It is based on a request form on the Internet. Staff members are rostered to ensure a speedy response to queries, usually within two working days.

feasibility of providing a real-time interactive digital reference service to remote users. It allows the user to chat with a Monash University reference librarian to get help in using electronic databases, locating information on the Web or in the catalogue, or with specific research questions. This trial service has been extended to 2004. 3.10 Document Delivery Unit The Document Delivery Unit provides Monash researchers with materials not held locally, by requesting items on their behalf from other libraries (see http://lib.monash.edu.au/services/ loans/docdel.html). Desktop delivery of electronic articles was introduced in 2001 using Prospero software to enable digital images of supplied articles. This popular new service has improved delivery time dramatically and has significantly increased convenience for users.

3.8 Monash University Library Telephone Service (MULTELS) The Library provides a centralised telephone enquiries service to Monash users as well as to members of the public (see www.lib.monash. edu.au/services/multels.html). MULTELS staff answer enquiries about Monash holdings, services and facilities. Other queries are referred to the relevant library’s information desk or the appropriate subject librarian. Staff members are rostered to provide a service seven days a week. 3.9 LiveHelp LiveHelp is an online chat-based reference help service that was piloted in 2002/2003. The objective of this pilot project was to investigate the

3.11 Services for off-campus students Distance education and mixed mode students located in all Australian states and more than 200 overseas countries have access to a range of services (see www.lib.monash.edu.au/services/ offcampus/). These services include:

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Figure 3 Reading list for a course on child development

Figure 4 The Virtual Librarian at Monash University

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enquiry service via telephone, fax, post or e-mail; and postal loans and photocopy service.

Off-campus learning students can also use a 1800 number (free call within Australia).

In a nutshell, the Library’s Web-based strategy is predicated on the use of an authenticated password, authcate, that controls access by all enrolled Monash students, whether on-campus, off-campus or offshore, to the Library’s comprehensive range of online services.

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The Library’s objective is to continue to improve its support services to enhance teaching and learning across all sites in Australia and internationally. Over the years, Monash University Library has developed into a very innovative organisation which is at the forefront of the use of information technology in its activities.

In 2002, the Library developed a checklist for use by the academic staff and the planning staff of Monash International. This checklist has been incorporated into the International Development Group Toolkit that was developed to facilitate planning of overseas courses. There is now a Web site with a link to the Library’s checklist of resources and services and an offshore library impact form. The checklist details the respective responsibilities of Monash University Library and the local partner. In essence, Monash University Library’s support of offshore programs is electronically based: . all students have access to the electronic resources of Monash University Library; . academics are encouraged to utilise electronic resources and digitise course readings where appropriate; . books, videos, CDs and other physical items in the Monash University Library collections are not sent overseas; and . variations in requirements for library support services are subject to negotiation.

4. Internationalisation: supporting overseas campuses The Library continues to develop strategies to support the various Monash initiatives in establishing overseas campuses and centres in alignment with the University’s Global Development Framework. Strategies include determining the range of support services to be provided, as well as the benefits of providing staff with international experience through staff exchanges and visits. The University has identified “sustainable global reach” as a key planning direction for University support services. The objective of the Library’s Global Service Task Force was to progress a range of services to guide and assist users, including voice and online services, and “real-time” personal reference advice via the Web. The establishment of strong alliances with local and international partners to provide services is another mechanism which will be pursued as part of the strategy to extend the range of services and their availability. The Library plays an advisory role in its support of the overseas campuses. Communication between the librarians across the continents is primarily through e-mail and, where necessary, by fax or telephone. The director, Corporate Services and International Development, has responsibility for liaising with the chief librarians of the overseas campuses, and provides advice when required.

5. Planning for offshore library support In view of the University’s increasing interest in offering offshore academic programmes, the Library’s biggest challenge has been to raise the awareness of University planners of the need to involve the Library in the planning process. Consultation with the Library at the earliest stage is particularly critical in the preparation of contracts on library support services to support the new venture. The contract with overseas partners should have a section for library materials and services with a schedule of the responsibilities of the local library and Monash University Library.

The contract should stipulate the local partner’s responsibilities, including: . study facilities; . computers with access to Monash electronic resources; . purchase of recommended texts, CDs, videos and other physical items; and . borrowing rights at local libraries with good academic collections.

6. Staff development and training Monash University Library staff members are the core resource in planning and enabling the implementation of the Library’s Strategic Plan. The Library recognises the importance of continuing education and retraining of library staff in appropriate information technology skills. Library staffing policies and practices are pitched at encouraging excellence in performance within a flexible working environment. When the University began establishing overseas campuses, the Library took on board the training of the key librarians of the Monash overseas venture to ensure consistency in service levels. Training programmes have been developed to assist the development of library staff from Monash Malaysia and Monash South Africa. In the initial stage of establishing the overseas libraries, Monash University Library staff conducted training workshops at the overseas sites for local library staff. Sessions included working with the Voyager catalogue, acquisition of materials, information literacy programmes and

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document delivery processes. There is also a programme of staff visits between the two libraries. It has now become regular practice for librarians from Monash Malaysia and Monash South Africa to visit Monash University Library once every 12-24 months to participate in intensive staff development programmes and to update their professional skills.

6.1 Current staff development training programmes The Library has developed a series of programmes that are tailored to meet the requirements of the visiting librarians. Feedback from the librarians who have participated in the programmes has been excellent. Due to interest by other visiting international librarians, Monash University Library is now offering staff development programmes for a modest fee for practitioners who wish to update their professional knowledge of a technologically advanced library operation. Module 1 of the staff development programme aims to introduce the participant to the operations of a large, technologically advanced university library with an international mission. Participants gain an understanding of the issues relating to delivery of electronic information to multiple locations, with a special focus on the Monash University Library’s operations and initiatives. The programme is a combination of seminar presentations on the key information service initiatives, discussions with specialists and project managers, and site visits. Participants are able to observe the operations of the diverse types of libraries within the Monash University Library system. Module 2 is aimed at managers and supervisors who want to develop their staff so that they work in a culture which produces a high standard of service. It outlines a framework of key elements to create an environment where staff embrace the goals and responsibilities of quality service, and work co-operatively to achieve them. Presentations include an overview of management skills, techniques for implementing change, performance management and quality reviews. Customised programmes are available for administrators who require a specially tailored programme or library study tour. Monash University Library provides a unique opportunity for library professionals to update their skills through targeted work experience attachments and a combination of shadowing of and mentoring by senior librarians with extensive experience in the management of a large and complex technologically driven academic library.

7. Challenges Advances in information and communications technology continue to mould and challenge the library world. In an era with a continuing rapid shift from print to electronic resources, the success of the Library is dependent on its ability to ensure that a robust infrastructure is sustained to support electronic resources and to deliver an effective virtual service. The Library has to ensure that access paths to information meet the needs of library users and that library staff, student and faculty staff skills are developed appropriately. The challenge facing Monash University Library is the ability to support the University’s goals. In the past decade, the Library has seen its research collections placed at risk by the huge increase in the cost of journal subscriptions and the access fees for electronic databases. Contrary to popular expectations, the Internet and electronic access can only provide a partial solution. Access to electronic databases is often severely restricted by pricing arrangements and licence agreements, which prevent sharing of information. The crisis in scholarly communication is a matter of concern to academic and library communities across all nations. Australian universities and research institutions are working collaboratively to purchase electronic information resources. Monash University Library is closely involved with the collaborative projects of the Group of Eight research universities (other members include the University of Adelaide, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales and the University of Western Australia), (Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL)) and the AVCC. The expansion of academic programmes across national borders has increased the complexity of assessing the cost effectiveness of library support services for the University’s international endeavours. Library administrators will need to look closely at the implications of licence agreements, the infrastructure costs of a Webbased strategy, and fine-tune the tools of cost benefit analysis.

8. Concluding remarks The vision of Monash University Library’s future is an exciting one, as the Library makes a paradigm shift to a new model of service using e-commerce technologies. Apart from establishing an infrastructure that will deliver the electronic suite

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of services and streamline the processes to deliver a cost-effective service, it is critical that library staff are equipped with the skills to cope with the brave new world of e-commerce. The new managers will need to have not only enhanced IT know-how, but also business, negotiation and marketing skills, as they will be required to compete with a host of new information providers.

To meet the vision of the global Monash, the Library has set in place strategies that will enable it to provide a suite of virtual services to support the University’s flexible and international initiatives. In the rapidly changing academic environment, it is critical that the Library continues to be the key stakeholder in information service delivery and maintains its standing as the intellectual heart of the University.

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1. Introduction

Archiving the Web: European experiences Juha Hakala

The author Juha Hakala is the Director of Information Technology, Helsinki University Library – The National Library of Finland, Helsinki, Finland.

Keywords Archiving, National libraries, Worldwide Web, Finland, Europe

Abstract Preserving the published cultural heritage of a country is a major concern of any national library, and the challenge of archiving and preserving information published on the Web is great. A short history of Web archiving in Europe from the Swedish Kulturarw3 project to the Nordic Web Archive initiative is provided, together with a generic discussion on the technical challenges of and the solutions developed for Web harvesting and archiving. Experiences from Helsinki University Library in Finland in the use and co-operative development of the NEDLIB (Networked European Deposit Library) harvester are given.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm

Historically, national libraries have assumed responsibility for preserving the published cultural heritage of their countries for future generations. This mandate has usually been based on deposit laws that require publishers to submit copies of all their publications to the national library. This responsibility has been limited to printed and audio-visual documents. More recently, legal deposit requirements have been extended to electronic publications. Unfortunately, a mere change in jurisdiction is no guarantee that these resources will survive, as the methods libraries have developed for preserving printed materials are not applicable to electronic sources. In fact, we need to design new tools and work flows in order to cope with the new resource types. Further, with the emergence of the Web as a principal publishing venue, national libraries have become concerned about the proliferation of cultural heritage materials available only on the Web. Some extended their depository responsibility to archive substantial parts of the national Web space in the 1990s, and now the number of national libraries experimenting with Web archives is growing fast. It is clear to all that manual means for collecting Web resources are impractical, and automated tools must be developed. In this text some of the European Web archival projects and tools which have been built will be described. Legal and organisational aspects of Web archiving will not be discussed, but readers should be aware of the fact that preserving the national Web space for future generations is not just a technical question. One of the main challenges is a political one: each nation needs to create a Copyright Act and an Act on Legal Deposit which allows its national library to carry out this task. Substantial funding will be needed as well, especially for the preservation of Web resources.

2. Defining the national Web space In order to be able to harvest all freely available Internet resources published in a country, simply retrieving everything from the root domain of a country domain (e.g. “.sg” for Singapore) is not enough. The national library, or other organisation responsible for this job, must also obtain valid server names from other top-level domains, such

Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 176-183 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337 DOI 10.1108/00330330410547223

Received: 6 January 2004 Revised: 29 March 2004 Accepted: 2 April 2004 All URLs in this paper were checked on 6 April 2004.

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as .com or .org. There are different methods for doing this. First, companies distributing domain names could provide a list of valid domains to the national library. However, these firms tend, with some justification, to think that this information is proprietary, and are not likely to provide the domain list to national libraries or any other organisation asking for it. Attempts in Nordic countries to obtain domain information in this way have all failed. Second, network providers can provide lists of domains that their domestic customers are using. In Finland, we managed to get such a list from two out of ten Finnish companies, which is not a satisfactory result. To make things worse, at least in Scandinavia, there are no rules and regulations that would entitle national libraries to obtain the domain information, so even if such data are received once, there is no guarantee that there will be any updates, as the library is dependent on the good will of the company delivering the information. Third, the national library could co-operate with organisations which have, for one reason or another, collected representative sets of domestic domains and/or server names from various root domains. This is the strategy chosen by the Finnish National Library, which has a partner that has delivered 60,000 server names (many of them not .fi). The last substantial update arrived shortly before the second harvesting round, which was done in Autumn 2003. Having such an exhaustive list of Web servers has helped us to get close to our ultimate aim of harvesting everything Finnish. It is possible to use linguistic methods to recognise languages in which the pages have been written, and then harvest everything written in the domestic language/languages. In Finland this technique works quite well for one of the domestic languages (Finnish) and is used to extend the pre-set server list. Unfortunately we cannot apply the same methods for Swedish. Generally, language is a valid criteria if, and only if, legal deposit is language-based. In Finland everything published in Finnish anywhere in the world is relevant: for major languages such as English, Spanish or Chinese, such an approach would not be viable. On the basis of our present archives a rough estimate can be made that in Sweden and Finland approximately 40 per cent of Web documents are located outside our country domains, i.e. .se and .fi, respectively. Due to the new top-level domains approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN; www.icann.com/) in 2001, an ever-growing number of Web servers will be located beyond country domains.

Therefore it is very important to use whatever efficient methods are available in order to create an exhaustive list of domestic servers. Because there are a lot of servers out there, trying to maintain such a list manually in the national library will not be a successful strategy. This proliferation of publishing has interesting legal undertones as well. In the past it has been possible to contact publishers and printing houses individually. On the Web this is no longer viable since so many people are making resources available there. Therefore any act on legal deposit should not put any obligations on Web publishers, except that the national library must have a right to harvest Web content. Interestingly, even this has been criticised by some authors who argue that Web content is, and should be, ephemeral: preserving it for future generations is wrong because the texts were never meant for future readers. The “deep Web” presents further challenges, as the percentage of Web documents being made available from within databases is increasing. This makes any Web server more secure and easier to manage, but unfortunately such content cannot be linked directly to a URL at all (or such a URL may be exceedingly complex), and so cannot be harvested with the present harvesters. Thus an important part of the Web is beyond our reach for the time being.

3. Web harvesting 3.1 What is a Web harvester? A Web harvester is an application which fetches and stores Web content according to a set of userdefined parameters. The operation of any Web harvester can be easily described at a generic level (although details can be complicated). A harvester is first fed a set of links (URLs) to qualifying Web documents. The larger this set is, the better. In Finland we used 60,000 page addresses as the starting point of the second harvesting round of our national Web space in Autumn 2003. The pages qualify either because they belong to the valid root domain (in our case, .fi), or because they have been published on the Web by a Finnish organisation (for instance, nokia.com is a valid address for us). These pages included in the first set are fetched and parsed in order to find hyperlinks (further URLs) embedded in them. These URLs are then filtered according to the harvesting criteria: those which qualify are put aside. The next step is to use the approved URLs to retrieve a second batch of documents, which is processed in a similar manner. This routine goes on until every valid document has been retrieved.

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Using this simple looking method, large portions of the Web can be covered quickly. The main problem in the system design is to build a good scheduling algorithm. A harvester must not drown a server with queries. The simplest means of keeping Web managers happy is to define the minimum time interval, for instance five seconds, between each request. If this is done, it is easy to calculate the minimum time harvesting will take: just find out how many files the largest Web server has, and multiply that with the time interval used. Because the Web consists of a large number of small servers and a small number of large servers, towards the end of the harvesting round the document flood becomes a trickle, as there are only a handful of servers left. Thus, designing an efficient scheduling algorithm is of major importance for harvester builders, and will be discussed in more detail below. The first harvesters were built in the mid-1990s to enable the creation of Web indexes such as Alta Vista. It was at this point that the first pioneers, most notably staff at The Internet Archive and the Royal Library of Sweden, built tools for collecting and archiving the Web. From the Web point of view, the basic technology behind Web archiving is therefore not new. However, there are not that many harvesters which were designed with archiving in mind. The so-called NEDLIB harvester, developed in the European Union (EU) funded project Networked European Deposit Library (NEDLIB) led by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Netherlands (see www.kb.nl/ coop/nedlib/) in 1997-2000, is one of them. Other partners in NEDLIB included: . Bibliothe`que Nationale de France; . National Library of Norway; . Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany); . Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal; . National Library of Switzerland; . Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze; and . Helsinki University Library in Finland.

terabytes of data. A good (but by now a little outdated) description of the project was written for the 2002 Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and institutions (Arvidson, 2002). The other Web archiving pioneer, The Internet Archive (see www.archive.org) has also been in operation since 1996, and has archived more than 300 terabytes of data from the global Internet in a dozen completed Web crawls. The archive is growing by approximately 12 terabytes monthly. The NEDLIB project decided to build its own tool for archiving when a formal assessment of existing public domain harvesters made it clear that the necessary technical adaptation to accommodate archiving features would be difficult to accomplish. There was also a risk that such adaptation might compromise the normal harvesters’ basic operating functions. For example, one harvester evaluated by NEDLIB was built to throw away URLs queued for retrieval if some pre-defined internal problems occurred. This behaviour may be acceptable when harvesting is done for indexing purposes, but for archiving this kind of technical solution (of course not mentioned in the documentation, but discovered by us in the source code) is highly problematic. Changing this and other non-optimal features in the tool in question and in other applications would have been difficult. Therefore, instead of using an existing harvester like the Royal Library of Sweden had done (they chose the Combine Harvester built at Lund University’s NetLab unit as the starting point), the NEDLIB project decided to build a new harvester, based on the specifications written jointly by the project partners. Had we known in advance how difficult it would be to build a really good and robust harvester, we might have been more forgiving of the limitations of the existing tools! The first version of the NEDLIB harvester was released in January 2000, but after thorough testing it became clear that the application still had a lot of problems with Web content: malformed documents or bogus URLs embedded in content often terminated one or the other of the harvester’s processes, forcing the operator to restart them manually. A second version of the harvester was published in September 2000. Testing continued in the national libraries of Norway, Estonia and Iceland, and further bugs and functional limitations were found. The errors were fixed, and testing went on, which then led to yet more reported problems. This process continued until September 2002, when version 1.2.2 of the harvester was finally deemed satisfactory. This has been used successfully in many countries, and hundreds of millions of Web pages have been retrieved with it.

These specialised harvesters have been designed to retain retrieved documents permanently. The server must have sufficient storage for storing all data, and the organisation responsible for the work should have legal justification for its deeds – for instance, an Act on Legal Deposit which encompasses Web materials. The idea of using harvester technology to preserve Web content first emerged in Sweden in 1996, where the Royal Library’s Kulturarw3 initiative (see www.kb.se/kw3/ENG/Default.htm) began to build tools for Web archiving. By 2003, Web archiving was an essential part of the Royal Library’s deposit activities. The Swedish Web has been archived ten times, and these ten sweeps have resulted in 185 million files containing over 5.5

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The NEDLIB harvester is freeware (available from www.csc.fi/sovellus/nedlib/). In its final form the application is quite robust, capable of harvesting tens of millions of Web documents. The first harvesting of the Finnish Web space in 2002 created an archive of 11.7 million files and 500 gigabytes from more than 40 million locations. In Spring 2003 we harvested some 15,000 pages relating to the Finnish parliament elections: such special harvests will complement full harvests to be done once or twice a year. The second full harvesting round started in August 2003 and was completed early in 2004. There are now 18 million files from 50 million locations in the archive. Because the NEDLIB harvester works incrementally (see below), no file is stored more than once, and due to this, the second generation archive contains only 800 gigabytes of compressed data. The Finnish Web has been harvested by a Sun E450 server with one 480MHz CPU, 1GB memory and 8 £ 36:4GB disk. In spite of this modest server, harvesting has only taken a few months: the NEDLIB harvester has reasonably modest hardware requirements. But in April 2004 we will purchase a new Sun V880 server with four 1.2GHz CPUs and 16GB memory in order to perform harvesting faster in future. Data is stored on a tape robot located in the Finnish Centre for Scientific Computing. This guarantees safe archival of bits: whether it will be possible to enable access to all resources over time remains to be seen. The problems found in testing the NEDLIB harvester were most often related either to bad data or poorly developed HTTP server applications. Our Swedish colleagues involved with the Kulturarw3 project had similar experiences. Having done the job many times, they knew pretty well what makes harvesting the Web a difficult enterprise. Thus, although building a harvester looks like an easy task, it is actually quite difficult to do because the Web is not a friendly place. Browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator can tolerate almost everything and are therefore very good at hiding the gory details of the Web, but any application built not to display but to process millions of Web documents must be prepared for everything. To give you an idea of what can happen, the NEDLIB harvester once retrieved an HTML file with a large “blob” of binary data in it. This surprise encounter brought the early version of the harvester HTML parser module to its knees. Needless to say, this harvester module no longer aborts if it encounters such a file, or other malignant cases such as URLs longer than 256 bytes.

The NEDLIB harvester was of course not built from scratch. We used existing applications, such as the calculation of the MD5 (Message Digest) checksum needed for automatic generation of identifiers for stored files, and for duplicate control. Testing revealed some problems in these third-party applications as well, and the most serious ones were fixed. To date, the harvester has been tested in at least ten European countries, and Finland, the Czech Republic and Norway are examples of countries using it to archive their national Web spaces. Development and use of this tool has given national libraries a good understanding of the technical issues related to Web harvesting. Specific issues to be addressed are discussed below.

3.2 Storage A major consideration for any Web archiving system is storage. Any archiving tool will need disk space for: . the database controlling the harvesting activity (in the NEDLIB harvester, MySQL); . the workspace in which the harvested documents are processed (e.g. extraction of metadata) and prepared for archiving; and . the archived documents. There is no way of knowing in advance the exact size of any country’s archive during a Web sweep. Having done the job once helps, but since the Web grows exponentially it is hard to make an accurate estimate of how large the archive will be five years later. However, experiences from Finland and Sweden indicate that the national Web spaces remain surprisingly small. The Finnish archive took only 500GB in 2002 and grew to 800GB after the 2003 harvesting round. The main factor influencing the disk space requirement is whether the harvester is incremental (every file is stored only once, either during one harvesting round or even within multiple harvests) or non-incremental: in the latter case every file is stored. Had the NEDLIB harvester not been incremental, the first Finnish harvest would have produced approximately 40 million files instead of 11.7 million, and the archive would have been two to three times larger. I believe that a good Web harvester should operate incrementally. Keeping multiple copies of files is wasteful and maybe even counterproductive. Any archiving module should calculate the MD5 checksums for files in order to find all copies of a resource: if this is not done, future users of the Web archive must carry out file comparisons themselves in order to decide whether one file is an exact copy of an another.

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3.3 Scheduling issues As explained above, a simple Web harvester which relies on a fixed time interval between file retrieves cannot be efficient if it is behaving well. Efficient scheduling requires that the harvester keeps track of server behaviour and retrieval functionality. If a lot of documents have been fetched from a single system and its response times have been consistently good, it can be safely assumed that the HTTP server in question is a large one with powerful server hardware, and can survive more frequent harvester visits. On the other hand, if a server is always slow it might be a good idea not to bother it every five seconds, and set up a less frequent visiting schedule. This kind of adaptive scheduling was implemented in the second release of the NEDLIB harvester. Based on the data gathered during harvesting, the application can make visits to appropriate sites more frequently. A harvester which keeps track of server behaviour can be made more efficient. But in one respect any harvester must be strict: whenever a document contains inline images, these need to be put on the top of the harvesting queue and retrieved as soon as possible, even if the files do not reside within the pre-set limits. This maximises the probability of retrieving all components from which the relevant Web page is built. If inline images were not given a priority – or even worse, if normal exclusion rules were applied to them – our archive might consist of many partial Web pages. The NEDLIB harvester does prioritise inline content, and the need for enabling this was one of the reasons the existing harvesters did not qualify. When evaluating these tools, one conclusion was that modifying the scheduling policy is non-trivial. If a tool did not have a special policy for inline content – and why should a tool built for indexing purposes have one? – it was not easy to even find the places in the source code where modifications were required or possible. Generally, a Web harvester does not do too many things, and usually these things are simple. But the Web harvester application does do these things hundreds of millions of times, and therefore good design and efficiency are of key importance. And whenever things get complicated, good design based on the actual needs of the national libraries is essential. The NEDLIB project did a lot in clarifying these needs, but we have not yet completed the work – new projects are needed, and they must invest a lot in the design and planning of systems.

metadata and to process the harvested documents so that they can be stored and indexed. Just storing the harvested files on disk is insufficient. Without harvesting related metadata, it would be impossible to determine where and when the archived documents were retrieved. Nor would it be possible to prove that the document had not been changed during the archival period, which would badly compromise its authenticity. Although the NEDLIB harvester stores the original URLs for files as accompanying metadata, it does not rely on them to serve as unique identifiers, since over time the data content in a given location will often change or the resource may be moved to new or multiple locations. Traditional identifiers, such as the ISBN or ISSN number embedded in the document, cannot be used as archive identifiers either, as there may be many versions of an electronic book, each one with the same ISBN. In the archive, all these versions, even if the differences between them are small, have to be stored and identified separately. Therefore the harvester calculates an MD5 checksum of each file, and uses that sum as the archive identifier. In addition, this unique access key enables duplicate control and authentication. Although duplicate documents are retrieved during harvesting, they can and actually should be removed before archiving to reduce storage needs. Users of the NEDLIB harvester have reported a 1:3 ratio between stored and retrieved files. In Finland, 11.7 million files out of 40 million survived after duplicate control. The question is, can we rely on the MD5 checksum now, or in the future when the collection consists of hundreds of millions of documents? The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm (see www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1321.txt) is the Internet standard RFC 1321. The MD5 value for a file is a 128-bit value similar to a checksum. Its length (conventional checksums are usually either 16 or 32 bits) means that the possibility of a different or corrupted file having the same MD5 value as the file of interest is extremely small. Thus we felt that the MD5 technique would be sufficient for duplicate control in a Web archive. Since duplicate files are deleted, a harvester must create and store a list of URLs from which the documents were originally collected. This information may be useful in many ways, not least in uncovering copyright infringements. Based on the MD5 checksums of copyrighted documents, a publisher can use the Web archive index to check whether any unauthorised copies of a document have been found. More advanced linguistic methods can be applied in order to find remarkable similarities between texts.

3.4 Metadata Utilising Web harvesting technology for preservation purposes requires the development of an archive module. Its task is to generate archival

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The NEDLIB harvester also generates a time stamp, which shows the exact time the document was harvested. If the document is retrieved again from the same location and is found, on the basis of MD5, to be the same, the second time stamp is stored. The archive can then be used to verify that the document has remained unchanged and available on the Web during the period defined by the first and last time stamp. If the third harvesting round finds the document unchanged, the second time stamp is updated.

and ended in June 2002. It had more funding than any previous Nordic digital library project, with a total budget of 2 million Danish crowns (250,000 Euros, approximately $300,000 at the exchange rate of October 2003). The main part of the NWA resources came from the Nordunet2 research programme (see www.nordunet2.org/). There is nothing new about the indexing of Web documents: indeed, this activity has been the key function in every Web index, from Alta Vista to Google. There are many companies developing software especially for indexing Web content (see www.searchenginewatch.com for a list of the most well known systems). However, these standard indexing products are not sufficient as such for a Web archive. The indexing application must be able to process additional metadata generated by a harvester, i.e. archive identifiers, location information, and time stamps. Since the NEDLIB harvester stores all metadata into relational database tables, from which the data can be extracted as text, indexing the metadata should not be too difficult. The NWA project did not have resources for developing a text-indexing engine of its own: our preferred choice would have been an efficient public domain application. Unfortunately, an evaluation of existing products led us to conclude in January 2001 that the tools available were not suitable for indexing extremely large and varied document collections such as Web archives. The NWA project group decided that the best strategy would be to co-operate with an existing textindexing engine vendor. In February 2001 the project group decided to acquire the search engine developed by a Norwegian company FAST Search and Transfer ASA (see www.fastsearch.com/). The same application has since been chosen by others, such as the publisher Elsevier. FAST has created and made available for free a global Web index, which in March 2004 contained 3.15 billion files (see www.alltheweb.com/). Based on projected Web growth rates, this capacity is definitely sufficient for indexing even the union of all Nordic Web archives for the foreseeable future. In addition to indexing, the FAST search engine does quite a lot of pre-processing. This includes, for example, conversion of documents into XML (indexing is only done in this format) and language recognition and subsequent morphological analysis of texts. The NWA libraries were themselves responsible for creating the user interface. By the end of the project in 2002, the Nordic national libraries did have, for internal use, a complete toolset for harvesting, archiving and indexing the Web. The actual use of the NWA toolset (i.e. searching and navigating a Web archive) is done via a regular Web

3.5 Database considerations All administrative information related to harvesting and metadata generated by the NEDLIB harvester is stored in a MySQL relational database. The database and workspace reside on disk, and the harvested files are stored in a UNIX file system, either on disk or tape, depending on access time requirements. The NEDLIB harvester uses TAR software to merge a configurable number of harvested documents into a single file. The archive file is compressed with ZIP software in order to save storage space. Reversing this process is relatively fast, so the response time that can be achieved with this technique is acceptable if performance is not an overriding concern. The archived files are not stored in a database, since this would prevent the use of tape and other slow and affordable storage media. Database usage might also complicate the long-term preservation of documents if the documents cannot be extracted from the database in original form. Using a database for storage might also become a problem if there is an inherent limit on database size or on the number of items it can hold, or limitations on file formats that can be handled. The main downside of using a file system for storing the archived documents is that a second database must be built for indexing the documents.

4. Indexing a Web archive A Web archive built with a suitable harvester is not accessible as such to end users. The documents in the archive must be indexed with a full-text search engine, preferably one optimised for indexing Web content. This module of the Web archive was outside the scope of NEDLIB, but work on building an access module begun in Scandinavia at the same time as the NEDLIB project was reaching a close. The Nordic Web Archive (NWA; see http://nwa. nb.no/) was a collaborative project of the Nordic national libraries, which began in September 2000

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browser, and no special “plugins” are needed to make it work. By the time the NWA project was over, many of the NWA tools were not sufficiently robust to be made available in the public domain. Therefore the participating libraries sent a proposal for a NWA II initiative to NORDINFO, which decided to support the initiative. NWA II started in March 2003, and completed its work in March 2004. So anyone who wants to archive Web content can use the NWA toolset for the job. In return the NWA libraries wish that future users will develop the toolset further. The NWA Toolset source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL; see www.gnu.org/licenses/ licenses.html#GPL) and was made available at Sourceforge (see http://nwatoolset.sourceforge. net/) in January 2004. The NWA toolset (version 1.0) consists of three modules: (1) Document Retriever, which serves as the interface to the Web archive. It delivers archive objects and associated metadata to the Exporter and the Access Module upon request. (2) Exporter, the purpose of which is to transform the archive objects and associated metadata to an intermediate XML format, named the NWA Document Format, which is then fed to the indexer of a search engine. (3) Access Module which interfaces both the search engine and the Document Retriever, thus giving the user the possibility to search, browse and navigate the archived Web documents.

Lucene it is possible to build a Web archive with very low or zero software costs, depending on the server used (NEDLIB harvester runs on Linux, but works better on Solaris). Project-based co-operation in software development has definitely been a viable option for the Nordic national libraries. None of us would have been able to develop the Web archiving tools by ourselves, or pay for a commercial company to develop them. The future of these tools is dependent on how popular they become and the willingness of future users to invest in improving them further. An important feature of the NWA toolset and the NEDLIB harvester is modularity: each tool and module of the harvester communicates with other tools and modules via clearly defined interfaces. Thus it is relatively easy, for example, to reprogram the scheduler module of the NEDLIB harvester and leave the rest of the application as it is. Changing the search engine should not be too difficult either, although there is not much experience about adding new search engine abstraction layers.

To actually use the set, the following additional components are needed: . A Web archive, i.e. a historical collection of Web documents, stored along with archive metadata. A key requirement for the archive is that the objects are stored unaltered and that a metadata set consisting of at least the original URL and timestamp indicating the objects harvesting time is available. . A search engine. . A search engine abstraction layer. At present, the NWA Toolset supports the Apache Jakarta Lucene search engine (see http://jakarta. apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html) and the FAST search engine. Other users wishing to support other search engines will have to implement their own search engine abstraction layer. The FAST search engine will most likely remain a commercial application, but Jakarta Lucene is a Java-based freeware search engine. With the NEDLIB harvester, NWA Toolset and Jakarta

5. After NWA: International Internet Preservation Consortium In 2002 several European national libraries and The Internet Archive started discussions about possible co-operation in developing new tools for Web archiving. It was not too difficult a choice for the Nordic national libraries to get involved with these talks. Although the NEDLIB harvester works reasonably well, it has one fundamental shortcoming. The application is no longer developed and supported by the Finnish Centre for Scientific Computing. Moreover, it is not certain that the Nordic national libraries can maintain the NWA toolset now that the project funding is over. The negotiations between The Internet Archive and national libraries were successful. In the Summer of 2003 the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) was formed. This consortium consists of The Internet Archive and 11 national libraries, and aims at fostering Web archiving via the development of standards, best practices and tools for this purpose. Six working groups, including access tools, deep Web and research requirements, have been formed. These groups are responsible of developing the new Web archiving tools. Experiences from earlier projects such as NEDLIB and NWA are used in this work. The consortium is led by the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France, and participating libraries include the British Library and all Nordic national

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libraries. More information about the work will be available from the consortium’s Web site, to be opened during 2004 at http://netpreserve.org. Many IIPC libraries are participating in the development of The Internet Archive’s nextgeneration Web archiving tool, called Heritrix. This project aims at “building a flexible, extensible, robust, and scalable Web crawler capable of fetching, archiving, and analysing the full diversity and breadth of Internet-accesible content”. Heritrix will be an open source application, and in March 2004 the developers planned to make version 1.0 available in Summer 2004. More information about the tool and its development status is available at http:// sourceforge.net/projects/archive-crawler/. IIPC and related activities will have a central role in Web archiving. Even the fact that the consortium exists proves that the importance of preserving the Web for future generations has been recognised, and that national libraries are eager to co-operate in this work. Indeed, the problems and solutions for preserving the Web are basically the

same everywhere, from Europe to Asia. I hope that the tools built by NEDLIB and NWA and future applications still to be developed by the IIPC consortium will be used by many national libraries and other organisations who are responsible for preserving the Web for generations to come.

Reference Arvidson, A. (2002), “The collection of Swedish web pages at the Royal Library: the Web heritage of Sweden”, available at: www.ifla.org/IV/ifla68/papers/111-163e.pdf

Further reading Hakala, J. (2001), “Collecting and preserving the Web: developing and testing the NEDLIB harvester”, RLG DigiNews, Vol. 5 No. 2, available at: www.rlg.org/preserv/ diginews/diginews5-2.html#feature2

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1. Digital libraries and sustainability

Digital transformation of libraries in Brunei Darussalam: addressing the sustainability issues of VILIS Brunei

1.1 Digital libraries: definitions As we move towards constructing digital libraries, we need to remember that libraries are not merely collections of works. They have both services and traditions that are a critical part of their functions. Libraries interoperate with each other to serve the information needs of a variety of different user groups today, and expect to sustain themselves and their collections so that they can serve users 100 years from now. They defend their users’ right to access content, and to do so with some degree of privacy or anonymity. The digital collections we build will not truly be digital libraries until they incorporate a significant number of these services and traditions (Besser, 2002).

Haji Suhaimi Bin Haji Abdul Karim

The author Haji Suhaimi Bin Haji Abdul Karim is Senior Librarian, University Brunei Darussalam, Brunei.

Keywords Digital libraries, Government, Economics, Brunei, Economic sustainability

Abstract In Brunei Darussalam the implementation of a technical infrastructure to improve access to the digital world and various e-government initiatives are empowering the country through an informed community and an efficient government. A number of ICT-related projects have been planned and implemented under the Brunei Economic Development Council and e-government initiatives. Digital libraries and the digital transformation of heritage information have been identified as the most viable areas to be developed in an effort to strengthen the information basis of the community. This paper describes the plans for one important project, the Virtual Library System of Brunei (VILIS Brunei), and outlines the economic sustainability issues being considered.

Libraries have experienced a strong shift in focus over the past decades towards digital formats for information resources. In a growing number of libraries, there is now an attitude that user demands will be made through digital media and electronic dissemination as much as through paper-based media. Universities are providing improved teaching and learning resources via digital media. National libraries such as the British Library and the US Library of Congress are developing large technical infrastructures. The phrase “digital libraries” has been linked with many other phrases, such as “electronic library”, “hybrid library” and “virtual library”. Numerous definitions exist, and they vary considerably. According to Halliday and Oppenheim (1999): The term digital library is used less precisely and may refer to anything from a limited list of hotlinks to the entire content of the Internet.

Miller (2002), described a digital library as being based on the following two components: (1) The commercially produced databases, electronic journals and books and other electronic resources that are routinely purchased or licensed by a library for delivery via the library’s interface to users both inside the libraries and remotely, and for which library funds are expended for their purchase or licence. (2) Those digital materials that are produced within the library or university and subsequently made available to users electronically.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm

Sun Microsystems (2002) define a digital library as: The electronic extension of functions users typically perform and the resources they access in a traditional library. Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 184-193 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337 DOI 10.1108/00330330410547232

Received: 9 January 2004 Revised: 13 March 2004 Accepted: 30 March 2004 All URLs in this paper were checked on 6 April 2004.

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With digital libraries, an individual may be able to: . gain access to information about the holdings of libraries worldwide through online public access catalogues; . locate both physical and digitised versions of scholarly articles and books; . optimise searches, simultaneously search the Internet, commercial databases, and library collections; and . save search results and conduct additional processing to narrow or qualify results and then click through to access the digitised content or locate additional items of interest. In the context of the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Brunei Darussalam’s e-Education initiative, a digital library is defined as: . . . a portal that comprises components of electronic resources, bibliographic databases of full-text journals and other knowledge-based information sources made available through the Internet and required by various sectors in the teaching and learning communities. It is a set of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating, searching and using information. In this sense, they are an extension and enhancement of information storage and retrieval that manipulate digital data in any medium (text, image, sound, static or dynamic images) and exist in digital networks. It offers various scholarly information services that range from bibliographic to specialised information services including full-text electronic databases and digital publishing.

1.2 Sustainable development Sustainability in the context of this paper refers to two interdependent and related areas, namely: (1) the internally or externally generated resources needed to maintain the digital material over time; and (2) the preservation strategies needed to maintain future access and authenticity. Hence, issues of business models and sustaining access through preservation are important in the strategies adopted by the digital library projects in Brunei Darussalam. The effective utilisation of financial resources and the returns on investment efforts are part of the ongoing debate between local information professionals and the e-government funding authority, as digital library investment will cover the following expenses: . immediate start-up costs of either creating or purchasing digital content and infrastructure, including hardware and software; . further implementation costs for establishing a digital library or even just basic access to bought resources; and . costs implicit in preserving, managing and maintaining digital resources in the longer term.

2. E-government and e-library initiatives in Brunei Darussalam Brunei Darussalam is a sultanate situated in the Northwest of the island of Borneo, with a population of some 330,000 (see www.brunei. gov.bn/about_brunei/land.htm). Against the background of the 8th Brunei Government Five Year Development Plan, which began in the year 2000, the Government of Brunei Darussalam has formulated a national IT strategic plan, called “IT2000 and Beyond”. For this, the Brunei Government National IT Council (BIT Council) was formed, with the following aims: . to advise His Majesty’s Government in matters pertaining to IT; . to assist Brunei to achieve the vision, mission and goal of the National IT strategy plan for the year 2000 and beyond; and . to advise, formulate and implement activities with regard to the development and usage of IT. The formation of the BIT Council is in line with the national IT mission, which states that it aims to lead and facilitate the strategic development and diffusion of state-of-the-art IT for the entire nation. Since its inception the BIT Council has been able to co-ordinate several efforts by relevant government and private sector agencies in the country to improve the utilisation of ICT in various sectors of the community. The Brunei e-Government initiative, which aims to establish electronic governance and services to best serve the nation, is a strong indication that Brunei has the serious intention of achieving a knowledgebased economy with state-of-the-art ICT development. The e-government vision is to be an e-smart government in line with a 21st century civil service, and this vision is currently taking shape in several ministries, including: . the Treasury Accounting Finance Information System; . Human Resource Management Systems; . e-Education; . e-Procurement; . e-Health; . Mukim.Net; . the Government IT Network; and . the Multipurpose Smart Card. The focus of the Brunei Darussalam e-government initiative goes beyond the physical infrastructure, with the overarching challenge of modernising and increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the public sector “machinery” in the country. The project covers a wide area of the ICT needs of each ministry, including hardware, data centre, PC requirements, and content development and

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training requirements. The digital transformation of libraries and the provision of digital resources for the teaching and learning communities in the country are among the key areas that have been considered as part of these initiatives. The most significant are VILIS Brunei and e-library@ubd, which are projects initiated under the e-Education initiative of the MOE. In e-Education, digital library developments have been placed under the MOE’s five pillars of strategic ICT components, in line with Edunet (Internet for schools), e-Learning, Education Information Systems and Human Capacity Building. In addition, there are other Government IT projects being undertaken using a special funding arrangement outside the e-government initiatives. For instance, the Baitulhikmah Digital Library of State Mufti Department is a specially funded government project under the Prime Minister’s Office.

currently at a disadvantage by not having these resources. Also, UBD is in need of more electronic resources to support expansion of its academic programmes and research activities, as print-based materials are not adequate to support and complement the “dynamism” of these programmes. Budgetary constraints are hampering the development of information resources in academic institutions and are affecting the quality of teaching, learning and research. The budget for libraries has not been very generous, and in higher education institutions the money allocated is often far below requirements, especially for subscribing to electronic resources. It has to be recognised that these electronic resources are not “a rich man’s toy” any more, but a necessity and an advantage for the future development of institutions of learning in Brunei Darussalam. The difficulties in acquiring locally published materials and archival papers are also hampering learning, teaching and research activities in Brunei Darussalam. Publications about the country and works by local writers are greatly in demand, especially among university students, academics and foreign institutions, and the book trade is still in its infancy. Information is usually stored in dispersed locations and access is mainly confined to specific institutions. Rules and regulations in these institutions vary: some are restrictive, while some are flexible. Searching through the collections is a very time-consuming, manually based process. There is no central bibliographic database for identifying the collections and facilitating document delivery. Local electronic publishing industries are currently not well developed to meet the challenge of a knowledge-based economy. Publishing houses in Brunei such as Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Pusat Sejarah, Jabatan Penerangan, UBD and many others are still focusing on paper-based publications and production is still below the desired level. E-business related to publishing is still not being explored. Most of the current institutional information system infrastructures are inadequate to accommodate ever-changing requirements, but this is changing. “Distance learning” is a new catchphrase for many academic institutions in Brunei. Many private institutions have already embarked on this venture, and there is a tendency that academic institutions are planning to embark on similar projects based on the “calak Brunei concept” or Bruneian character. Establishing information resources to support distance learning course content and information delivery mechanisms is one of the applications to be developed by VILIS in partnership with relevant parties. The MOE will be embarking on e-learning initiatives very soon after a careful evaluation of a pilot project with UBD.

3. Scenarios of opportunities The digital transformation of libraries in Brunei is happening at a slow pace. Only one library so far, that of the University Brunei Darussalam (UBD), has embarked on transforming its collections into digital format. Most libraries, except for UBD, Institute Teknologi Brunei (ITB), State Mufti and the Ministry of Defence are still using a traditional library management approach. However, most school libraries now have Internet access. Currently only UBD Library offers access to electronic resources, including online dictionaries, electronic encyclopedias, e-journals, bibliographic databases and some digitised resources. Figure 1 shows the homepage of the UBD Library Web site (www.ubd.edu.bn/suppserv/library/index.htm). The Brunei Investment Agency (BIA) and some financial institutions are accessing the Bloomberg and Datastream databases on a subscription basis. E-journals are among the most sought-after information resources in many academic libraries and teaching institutions, as well as business communities, in the country. Because of the high cost and budget limitation factors, many have resorted to a “wait and see” approach. It is widely recognised that primary resources such as scholarly journals, reports and statistical data are vital for personal and institutional research, teaching and for market or strategic purposes in business organisations. The VILIS initiative recognises the importance of making e-journals and e-books available to all colleges and higher education centres, including the School of Nursing and the teaching hospitals in Brunei Darussalam. Most of these institutions are

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Figure 1 Homepage of the Web site of the Library at the University of Brunei Darussalam

4. Digital library projects There are three projects already approved by the authorities at the ministerial and governmental level and these are briefly described in this section, with the remainder of the paper being concerned specifically with the VILIS project.

4.1 VILIS Brunei VILIS Brunei is a national digital library initiative, spearheaded by the MOE in conjunction with the needs of other heritage and information institutions, such as the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Library, Brunei Museum Library, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and other ministries in the country. The VILIS project will also take into account the needs of institutions of higher learning, colleges and secondary schools in Brunei Darussalam. VILIS comprises several components, such as the provision of hardware and software, e-resources, information products and services, library automation and digital publishing, as described further in the next section.

4.2 e-library@ubd The e-library@ubd project is being developed in line with current technological advances and the need for an efficient storage and retrieval mechanism on the part of the UBD library, at the same time initiating a robust digital library and content digitisation initiative for the purpose of enriching national digital resources and preserving them in electronic form.

4.3 Baitulhikmah Digital Library Baitulhikmah Digital Library is the development of an Islamic digital library project initiated by the State Mufti Library, Prime Minister’s office. It involves building an Islamic Library Portal, content development, including digitisation of key Islamic reference sources, and the implementation of an integrated library management system for the library.

5. VILIS Brunei 5.1 General overview of VILIS VILIS Brunei is meant to serve the information needs of the teaching and learning communities in

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Brunei Darussalam. It is a digital library offering various services that are beyond library catalogues and bibliographic information. It provides access to specialised information services, including electronic databases, online reference enquiries, interlibrary loans, digitisation, and electronic publishing. One of the vital components of VILIS is the ability to create, search, use, store and preserve local publications and information of national and international interest accessible on a subscription or pay-per-view basis. In this sense, it is an extension and enhancement of information storage and retrieval mechanisms that manipulate digital information in any medium (i.e. text, image, sound, static or dynamic images) and exist in digital networks. VILIS Brunei aims to make available relevant and adequate electronic information resources to all sectors of the learning and teaching community in the country, in an equitable, co-operative and cost-effective manner. VILIS also aims to support the research and information needs of learning and teaching, and meet the overall objectives of the national education system of Brunei Darussalam. To achieve the above aims, the following objectives are stated: . to establish adequate and efficient electronic information resource services (including reference and information delivery) to support the informational needs of academic institutions, while at the same time supporting members of the professional community in Brunei Darussalam; . to provide adequate bibliographic, text-based directories and other information sources required by administrators, academics and students of academic institutions and members of the professional community in Brunei Darussalam; . to establish “a one-stop shop” of information resources and services of academic and educational value to schools and higher education institutions in Brunei Darussalam; . to enrich the national online resources with locally produced digital content; and . to strengthen the existing rapport in terms of information sharing among information and heritage institutions, including academic and school libraries.

5.3 Conceptual framework of VILIS VILIS Brunei comprises the following conceptual framework: . resources – reference resources, databases, e-journals, knowledge and archival repositories, union catalogue; . product and services – e-library service, current awareness, document delivery, membership, community information, distance learners’ service, general information service, online reference service; . e-business processes – online payment and charges for the accessing/acquiring relevant services, downloading of key resources, in-house printing, etc.; . technological implementation – library automation systems, hardware and software, integration of institutional digitisation initiatives; and . electronic publishing – co-ordinating and publishing locally produced materials.

5.2 Role of VILIS in the community Among the roles identified for VILIS are to: . be the “national” Digital Library of Brunei Darussalam – a digital repository of Bruneian knowledge of academic and leisure; . provide scholarly information to the community; . make available the Digital National Union Catalogue of Libraries in Brunei;

5.4 Technical components and features VILIS requires an infrastructure at local, national and international level that comprises a set of functions, capabilities, and/or services that will make it easier, quicker, and less expensive to develop, provide and operate a broad range of applications. This will include facilities, software, tools, documentation, and associated human support organisations covering the following:

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be active in electronic publishing and digitisation to enrich the collection of locally published material; house all the digital publications of the MOE (school textbooks, question banks, curriculum); provide relevant information services of electronic nature to the Bruneian community; take the leading role in library automation and digital library developments in Brunei; provide necessary assistance and consultancy on institutional digital library projects; co-ordinate the needs and requirements of other government agencies pertaining to digital library initiatives; enhance the information and technological literacy of the community; assist in the exploration of knowledge resources with relevant document delivery services; undertake e-business processes as part of its business agenda; undertake smart partnership and joint venture projects; promote lifelong learning among the community; and promote reading for leisure.

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Content. VILIS is a one-stop integrated digital library that offers users a “personalised” experience of having a digital library of their own. It provides remote access to the content and services of libraries and other information resources, combining an onsite collection of current and heavily used materials in electronic form, with an electronic network which provides access to, and delivery from, external sources. In essence the user is provided with the effect of a library created by bringing together technologically the resources of many libraries and information services. Info-structure. The info-structure of VILIS comprises the library management system, database management systems and a middleware tool that manages, integrates and supports the systems, content, services and facilities offered by VILIS. Hardware infrastructure. This component comprises the servers that host the content of VILIS and the communication tools that link the components together, as shown in Figure 2.

5.5 Expected benefits of VILIS 5.5.1 General benefits The implementation of VILIS is expected to bring about changes to the information-seeking activities of the learning and teaching communities in Brunei. The expected advantages are as follows:

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the availability of the resources will create a Bruneian society with a strong information base and information literacy, and hence enhanced individual research skills; the availability of electronic resources in VILIS will provide an impetus for all sectors of the teaching and learning communities in Brunei in solving the information resources vacuum, which will further enhance institutional research; improved search and retrieval tools will enable users to perform literature searches more efficiently and effectively; users will have the convenience of desktop access 24 hours a day, seven days a week; ability to navigate directly from an indexing database to the full text of articles referenced, and to follow further links from there; cost savings for subscriptions to electronic resources via a co-operative approach; cost savings for the storage of printed journals and reference collections, even though printed journals are still needed; stimulation of institutional learning, teaching and research; wide coverage of various subject disciplines will suit various professions; wider choice of information sources; and saving time in searching and retrieving information.

Digital transformation of libraries in Brunei Darussalam

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5.5.2 Benefits to learners The likely benefits of VILIS for learners in Brunei include: . offering an alternative learning environment with rich information sources that are related to specific groups; and . supporting the formation of multiple communities of practice, and co-ordinating learners’ interests and their role in these communities of practice.

with various organisations in governments and private sectors on a profit-sharing basis. Charges to be imposed will be minimal and will enable information to be selected and acquired as easily and quickly as possible to facilitate learning, teaching and research: . Bibliographic searching and compilations. These may also include selective dissemination of information (SDI) services. Clients may request in-depth information or specialised information involving lengthy searches of a range of printed and electronic resources or product packaging. These services will be available to individuals or to institutions. . Book loan and document delivery. These will also be offered to individuals or to institutions. A document request may be for a journal article, the chapter of a book, a newspaper article, or a microform resource. Requests will be made electronically through the VILIS portal service, by telephone or by e-mail. The outcome of each request will be delivered within 24 hours and the services will be offered in partnership with local public/ academic libraries (for the supply of printed resources requested) and postal and courier services (for the delivery of printed materials). . Business information services. These will provide, for a fee, online services such as Reuters Business Briefings, ProQuest Direct, Emerald Intelligence, Nexis.com, Infotrac (which includes Investext), Wilson Web, Global Access, and more. Clients may also request business information packaging based on individual and institutional requirements. VILIS will provide an adequate physical infrastructure to facilitate access to these services as well as training. . Electronic reference service. A service which allows users to manage their reference systems locally on an individual level or within a consortium or group of libraries is planned. The components would include “chat” functionality, local knowledge-based comprehensive reporting and administrative tools. . E-journal/e-book service. This service would provide access, based on special arrangements with the suppliers, to e-journals and e-books within VILIS for private institutions. An issue faced by many institutions is the increased ability of individuals and groups within an organisation to order information products online and therefore bypass the centralised services of the library. VILIS will act as national information provider to these resources, and will have marketing rights of the resources in Brunei.

5.5.3 Value to educators It is hoped that VILIS will be of value to educators in Brunei, as it is designed to: . support the information requirements of multiple learning communities so that a choice is given to the education professional to choose learning and reference resources that are filtered according to subject area; . integrate online and offline communications within the communities; . provide digital repositories inclusive of learning objects, question paper databases, and digital contents of academic value, so that educators can benefit from the existing knowledge and the best practices in their dayto-day work; and . alert educators to information on and details of events of specific personal interest. 5.5.4 Value to government ministries In addition it is hoped that VILIS will be of value to those in government ministries in Brunei by providing: . a flexible platform that encourages learnerfocused education with the resources available; . information support for various learning models and lesson-dispensing techniques, so that institutions, schools and parents have ample choice of information resources; and . centralised repositories of course content, projects, and question banks that enable work to be shared amongst colleagues. 5.6 VILIS economics of sustainability VILIS will need to have a well-planned business strategy in order for it to be sustainable and meet the challenges in the Internet business. There are various business propositions that VILIS will take advantage of and generate substantial income to sustain the services offered, as described below. 5.6.1 Selling the e-library service to the community Libraries are in the business of information, and information is now an important commodity that has high commercial value. The VILIS services will take into account help from and partnership

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5.6.2 Digital publishing rights and licensing rights Digital publication will be a key business venture of VILIS. Digital publishing, marketing and selling rights to the e-published and government-digitised materials will be undertaken by VILIS. With the sophisticated information system infrastructure in VILIS it will be possible to incorporate all government digitisation initiatives and provide a platform for the development of e-business in e-publishing and e-library services in Brunei Darussalam. VILIS will be enriched by a collection of digitised materials on Brunei and materials published by Bruneians or other government departments. All digital publications or digitised archival materials will be deposited in VILIS and will be made available on the Web for free or for a fee. VILIS will need to negotiate on the publishing, licensing and selling rights to all digitised government publications and also undertake the rights to market and sell digital publications of new works or publications by individuals, government departments or private sector organisations. VILIS will also offer digitisation services to individuals or organisations that wish to transform original scholarly or organisational works into digital format. This venture will take into account the need to conform to the current Brunei Darussalam Copyright Law and also to international Intellectual Property Rights legislation. Aspects of royalties and access rights to the published works in electronic format will also be addressed. Clients will be able to acquire or print new books published in Brunei by paying the cost for access and downloading part or the whole of the publication. Researchers will be able to search for local publications from the VILIS portal. The price for each access will be negotiated with the institutions or individuals concerned. VILIS will not only look at the local market for selling information but also at foreign individuals and institutions that require such information. VILIS will take into account restrictions and will control access to the electronic resources to be published and archived.

imposed are spread out among the consortium members based on criteria such as the number of full-time equivalent students, library holdings, and so on. Other benefits that can be derived from a consortial arrangement are as follows: . smaller libraries, such as school libraries, may be able to improve access to e-resources for a relatively small amount of money; . there will be more content available for the money spent; . content may be more likely to be used; and . publishers gain revenue from smaller institutions that could not otherwise afford to subscribe to any of their products.

5.6.3 Library consortium The term “library consortium” refers to a co-operative association of libraries that enables systematic and effective co-ordination of resources for improving services to users. This is one area that has been considered in addressing the economic sustainability of VILIS. Consortial arrangements for e-journals can benefit libraries financially in various ways. As the buying group expands, prices are lowered. A consortium purchase will take into account special arrangements in terms of subscription costs for access to the resources by members. Charges

5.6.4 Fund raising and sponsorship VILIS sees e-commerce opportunities in the area of sponsorship and fundraising. This could include corporate names appearing in connection with sponsored VILIS online services or banner advertisements. VILIS will also negotiate funding from various private institutions for the information services offered in conjunction with their informational needs. VILIS will create its own pool of management funds that will be used to manage and maintain the services offered. 5.6.5 Partnership and joint venture It is envisaged that VILIS will in the end become a corporate organisation in order for its business agenda to be successful and its services to be improved and upgraded. Smart partnership and joint venture projects will be established. These will investigate various profit-sharing activities or activities that can benefit both parties. VILIS may also provide opportunities for private sector organisations to buy shares and make it a joint venture company. Whatever the action taken, it will not jeopardise its initial purpose. Possible partnerships identified include: . a Postal Services Department and courier service company for document delivery services; . a local Internet Service Provider; . a finance company to facilitate e-payments; . private organisations for digital publishing projects; . a mobile telecommunication company for wider usage of VILIS services, possibly via mobile phones; . government ministries (Curriculum Department, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Institut Perkhidmatan Awam, Management Service Department, Jabatan Perkhidmatan etc.); and . professionals and local experts on references and information packaging.

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5.6.6. Information Packaging Service The Information Packaging Service will be offered to parents, professionals and students through the VILIS Web site or via a local Internet TV company. With minimal monthly charges, VILIS will provide parents with an information package (InfoPack) including the full text of periodical articles, encyclopedias, books and supporting material to help with children’s school projects and examinations. VILIS will also look at the possibility of offering learning packages for professional qualifications and personal development such as the Government Service Examinations.

Digitised resources that will form the key resources made available or sold through the VILIS portal will be funded by the host institution or by the copyright holders themselves.

5.6.7 Training programmes ICT and information literacy courses will be offered, and will be charged to those interested. The training programme may include the effective use of e-journals, online search strategies, Internet searching, and utilising digital library facilities for research and learning. 5.6.8 Selling the e-library solution VILIS will negotiate the right to market digital library solutions developed within Brunei Darussalam to other organisations in Brunei or overseas. Expertise and experience on e-libraries, in particular with knowledge about e-commerce, is rare. 5.6.9 Supporting distance learning It is inevitable that distance learning will be developed within higher education institutions in Brunei such as UBD and ITB. Also, many private education institutions now offer courses in the distance-learning mode. Hence, this provides business opportunities for VILIS to work with these institutions in making course content available and providing information resources for distance learners. 5.6.10 Consultancy work The experiences and technology acquired from setting up the VILIS project will provide opportunities for personnel to undertake consultancy work in other digitisation and digital library efforts in Brunei and overseas. 5.6.11 Institutional and ministerial funding The MOE will be able to fund VILIS’s information resources requirement of government academic institutions. As the introduction of VILIS promises future income and raises the status of the institutions and the education system as a whole, MOE will not abandon VILIS. Funding will be sought through the annual MOE budget expenditure in order for the key resources to be maintained for the benefit of the institution under the MOE.

5.6.12 E-commerce VILIS will also work closely with book vendors/ publishers in and outside Brunei to facilitate e-commerce for printed book sales. Clients will be able to access vendors’ databases for titles currently on the market, which will help facilitate ordering items that are required by an institution or individual. All books published in Brunei will be marketed by VILIS and appropriate selling arrangements (including discounts) will be arranged. In addition, other products to be sold through the VILIS portal will include software, photographs, etc. For any e-business transactions, VILIS will negotiate commission with the originators. 5.6.13 Going global Once VILIS reaches a level of maturity and a strong financial base, the company will venture out to seek “new pastures” overseas. Armed with digital library experience, digital information assets (about Brunei) and selling rights of the information resources, VILIS will be able to sell and market these resources to other institutions overseas. The marketable services will include: . Information Resources Package Licensing (e-journals, e-books, etc.); . Brunei-rich digitised information resources; . e-learning packages; and . e-library solutions that VILIS will be constructing.

6. Sustaining access Electronic information resources differ substantially from the print environment in terms of sustaining access and preservation. In a traditional library environment, preservation is based on the physical objects of the book, newspaper, manuscript and so on. Volume printing, physical persistence and multiple library collections help ensure preservation of and continuing access to such materials. In a digital environment, sustaining access and preservation of digital resources will require interdependent strategies in the short to medium term based on securing the computer system, storage media, data and documentation, and strategies for long-term preservation to address the issues of software and hardware obsolescence. Hence, VILIS will have to adopt preservation strategies incorporating the following:

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Migration. Data will be stored in a softwareindependent format and migrated through changing technological regimes. Technology preservation. There will be preservation of data along with the hardware and/or software on which it depends. Emulation. The look, feel, and behaviour of a resource is emulated on successive hardware generations.

knowledge or information and the way personal development takes place.

References

Any digitisation or content project will be created and maintained for the lifetime of the project and will have to make arrangements for longer-term preservation and access within institutions or with an appropriate repository.

7. Conclusion The VILIS project, with the provision of services and resources available for the majority of learning and teaching communities in Brunei Darussalam, will not only save in terms of cost but will also offer opportunities for the knowledge and research development of the nation. The value in services and convenience offered should be consistently maintained at the highest level. VILIS will provide a new dimension in knowledge accessibility and availability in Brunei Darussalam, because it will bring about radical change in the way we seek

Besser, H. (2002), “Moving from isolated digital collections to interoperable digital libraries”, paper delivered at the Victorian Association for Library Automation, Melbourne, 8th February, available at: www.gseis.ucla.edu/, howard/ Papers/vala01.html Halliday, L. and Oppenheim, C. (1999), Economic Models of the Digital Library, Loughborough University, Loughborough, p. 3. Miller, R.G. (2002), “Shaping digital content”, Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 97-103. Sun Microsystems (2002), “Digital library technology trends”, available at: www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/ whitepapers/pdf/digital_library_trends.pdf

Further reading University Brunei Darussalam Library (2003), An Information Requirements Survey, University of Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan. Yassin, Pengiran Dato Paduka Haji Abd. Hamid bin Pengiran Haji Mohd. (2003), “Spreading K-economy through e-government in Brunei Darussalam”, paper presented at the K-Economy: Competitiveness, Survival and Growth, ASEAN-EC International Conference.

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Digitisation of collections in Indonesian academic libraries L. Sulistyo-Basuki

The author L. Sulistyo-Basuki is Professor in the Department of Library Science, Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Keywords Digital libraries, Academic libraries, Indonesia

Abstract This paper provides an overview of digitised collections within universities in Indonesia, starting from the Ganesha Digital Library Network in 1998, which developed into the Indonesian Digital Libraries Network (IDLN), with 87 private and institutional members. The State Ministry of Research and Technology has distributed document digitising software (Docushare) to universities, and this has been used (for example by the Association of Catholic Universities in Indonesia) to digitise more than 14,000 documents. The challenges faced in the digitisation of materials in Indonesian libraries are outlined.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm

Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 194-200 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337 DOI 10.1108/00330330410547241

1. Background to digital library development in Indonesia Indonesia is a long chain of some 13,700 islands covering 1.9 million square kilometres, and has a population of about 210 million, 60 per cent of whom live on the island of Java, where the capital, Jakarta, is situated. Travel and communication between centres of population in Indonesia have presented challenges in the development of digital libraries. The concept of a digital library in Indonesia has its roots in 1998 when the Computer Network Research Group (CNRG) of Institut Teknologi Bandung (Bandung Institute of Technology, hereafter called ITB), the Knowledge Management Research Group (KMRG) in ITB, and the ITB Central Library were working together to develop the Ganesha Digital Library (Fahmi, 2001). Bandung is Indonesia’s third largest city and is the capital of West Java. The first version of the Ganesha Digital Library (GDL) included the digitisation of research documents. The GDL project is a voluntary initiative to manage the intellectual capital owned by ITB in electronic form and to make it available on the Web. This digital library initiative arose after the team developed a Web site for the ITB Central Library database that had been developed using the CDS/ISIS database software. Version 2 of GDL was developed by early 2000 and this was followed by Version 3 in late 2000. This became the basis of the Indonesian Digital Library Network (IDLN). In mid-2000 the International Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada provided a grant of US$60,000 for the development of a digital library system in Indonesia, ordering software, training, the installation of hardware and software, seminars, workshops and the dissemination of results. As the first step, the KMRG set up a Web site for the IDLN (see www.itb.ac.id) in August 2000. Details of the project’s mission, methodology, framework and development were outlined, and in addition a mailing list was set up. At a seminar in Bandung later in 2000 it was agreed that the name should be changed from IDLN to IndonesiaDLN as this was destined to be the first digital library network in Indonesia (see http://hub.indonesiadln.org/). Figure 1 shows a screenshot from IndonesiaDLN. IndonesiaDLN’s mission is to unlock knowledge of Indonesian people, especially the local content, and to share it nationally (Fahmi, 2002). This means that the IndonesiaDLN should be able to provide information about Indonesia such as students’ final projects, theses, dissertations, research reports, heritage, regional potency and so on. Following the seminar, a group All URLs in this paper were checked on 6 April 2004.

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Figure 1 Homepage of the IndonesiaDLN Web site

of Indonesian librarians established a forum called The Indonesian Cyberlibrary Society (ICS) which was the first virtual discussion forum for Indonesian librarians. Meanwhile, also in the context of digital libraries, the Kantor Menteri Negara Riset dan Teknologi (State Ministry of Research and Technology (SMRT)) issued software for digital library development, called Docushare produced by Xerox. Docushare is described on its Web site (see http://docushare.xerox.com/ds30/) as software for “capturing, managing, retrieving and distributing information globally in a Web-based environment”. Docushare was made available to higher education institutions in Indonesia with the objective of promoting the development of academic digital libraries rapidly.

2. Document digitisation 2.1 IndonesiaDLN In 2003 IndonesiaDLN comprised 87 partners consisting of 73 institutions, 11 individuals and three Warung Internet (or Internet kiosks, commonly called “Warnet”). Table I shows a list of 31 universities within Indonesia that are members

of IndonesiaDLN. The requirement for membership is that the participating institution must submit two or more documents, in digital form, to the IndonesiaDLN co-ordinator in the ITB Central Library. 2.2 Docushare Project In 2002, the SMRT awarded Docushare software to five institutions, three of which are academic libraries: Bogor Agricultural University; National Institute of Technology Bandung, West Java; and APTIK (Asosiasi Perguruan Tinggi Katolik di Indonesia or Association of Catholic Universities in Indonesia) Library Network. The other two recipients were the Scientific Information Documentation Centre and State Enterprise Jasa Tirta. The SMRT also issued incentives for the development of digital libraries in a number of other academic libraries, including: . Universitas Udayana (Bali); . Universitas Cenderawasih (Papua or West Irian); . Universitas Padjadjaran (Bandung, West Java); . Universitas Airlangga (Surabaya, East Java); . Universitas Lampung (Bandarlampung, South Sumatra); and . Universitas Sam Ratulangi (Manado, North Sulawesi).

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in 2001 the attendees agreed to use Docushare for APTIK’s digitisation activities. As the project co-ordinating institution for APTIK, the attending librarians unanimously appointed Universitas Parahyangan in Bandung as the project leader, based on its computer capacity and the readily available manpower. Figure 3 shows a list of some of the types of material digitised. As can be seen in Figure 3, the materials cover Masters theses, dissertations, research reports, in-house journals as well as undergraduate final work projects, known as skripsi. By 2003 the APTIK Library Network had digitised more than 14,000 documents, making this the largest digital library in Indonesia, with most of these documents being digitised by the Universitas Parahyangan library.

Table I University member libraries of IndonesiaDLN

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Institution

City

Universitas Syah Kuala Universitas Cenderawasih IAINa Sunan Gunung Djati ITB Central Librarty Pusat Studi Urban Desain ITB Departemen Teknik Industri ITB LSIK PSTI Universitas Islam Bandung Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Ekonomi Kesatuan Lembaga Penelitian Universitas Padjadjaran Universitas Terbuka IAIN Sunan Ampel STIKOM Surabaya Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang Universitas Airlangga Universitas Bina Nusantara IAIN Syarif Hidayatullahb Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Ekonomi Perbanas Universitas Indonesia Universitas Katolik Atma Jaya Universitas Al Azhar Indonesia IAIN Wali Songo Universitas Tanjungpura IAIN Antasari IAIN Raden Intan IAIN Sultan Syarif Qasim Universitas Sam Ratulangi IAIN Alauddin IAIN Raden Patah IAIN Sumatera Utara IAIN Sunan Kalijaga

Banda Aceh Jayapura Bandung Bandung Bandung Bandung Bandung Bandung Bandung Jakarta Surabaya Surabaya Bandung Malang Surabaya Jakarta Jakarta Jakarta Jakarta Jakarta Jakarta Semarang Pontianak Banjarmasin Lampung Jambi Manado Makasar Palembang Medan Yogyakarta

2.3 Indonesian Christian University Virtual Network The Indonesian Christian (Protestant) University Virtual Network (InCU-VL; http://incuvl.petra. ac.id) was established in 1999 and by 2003 had 17 member libraries with Universitas Kristen Petra in Surabaya as its co-ordinator (Rahardjo, 1999, 2003). This library has digitised more than 454 documents, including material forming the Surabaya Memory project, as shown in Figure 4.

Notes: a Institute Agama Islam Negeri (State Islamic Institute); b Now Universitas Islam Jakarta

2.2.1 Bogor Agricultural University Library Bogor Agricultural University Library (http:// ilkom.fmipa.ipb.ac.id/) has been using Docushare to digitise Masters theses and doctoral dissertations, and by 2003 about 630 doctoral dissertation and 800 Masters theses had been digitised. Figure 2 shows some information (in Bahasa Indonesia) about the digital collections in this library. 2.2.2 National Institute of Technology Bandung Library The National Institute of Technology Library has completely digitised Jurnal Itenas (Journal of the National Technology Institute) covering 18 issues, 24 research reports produced by lecturers at the institute, and nine other products. 2.2.3 APTIK Library Network The APTIK Library Network (http://library. unpar.ac.id), which was set up in the late 1980s, covers 13 Catholic-denomination higher education institutions. During its annual meeting

2.4 Universitas Indonesia The Faculty of Computer Science at Universitas Indonesia has a collection in digital form covering skripsi, Masters theses and research reports, and the Faculty of Medicine has been digitising its lecturers’ scholarly works for a while. The portal for distance-learning in library science, maintained by Universitas Indonesia Central Library, was still under construction at the time of writing. 2.5 State Islamic Institutions There are 22 State Islamic Institutions in Indonesia, known as Institut Agama Islam Negeri (IAIN). These are tertiary educational institutes operated by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Some of these have digitisation projects, including the Universitas Islam Negeri (State Islamic University) Syarif Hidayatullah in Jakarta and the Sunan Kalijaga Islamic University in Yogyakarta. 2.6 Other universities By mid-2001 the Universitas Syiah Kuala library (in Acheh) had Masters theses in digital form covering the fields of engineering, industrial engineering, information communication and technology. Some other academic libraries, such as Universitas Gadjah Mada (Central Java), Universitas Brawidjaja (East Java) and Universitas Airlangga (East Java), are also beginning to digitise some documents.

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Figure 2 Homepage of the library at Bogor Agricultural University

2.7 Technology information kiosks Pendit (2002) classified the initiatives toward the development of digital libraries in Indonesia into four groups: (1) The university sector, including the Ganesha Digital Library and IndonesiaDLN. (2) The Government sector, with developments such as the Warung Informasi Teknologi or Warintek (Technology Information Kiosk), which has the goal of reaching a wide number of people in the community. This mission is mainly centred on education and appropriate technology. (3) E-government initiatives involving department offices in Jakarta as well as in regions and towns which provide information through the Internet. (4) Arts and the preservation of national and local heritage such as the Surabaya Heritage project (see www.petra.ac.id/surabaya-memory/ english/about.htm). During 1998-1999 the Scientific Information Documentation Centre Council of Sciences of Indonesia designed and implemented an “appropriate technology” information service called “Ilmu Pengetahuan dan Teknologi Daerah”, or Regional Science and Technology. Its activities

expanded with the support of the State Ministry of Science and Technology, and by 2000 the Technology Information Kiosk was proclaimed as a national programme operated by the SMRT. The Technology Information Kiosk’s mission is to bridge the digital divide, disseminating appropriate technology information, stimulating growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well stimulating the Technology Information Kiosk holders to produce CD-ROMs containing local content. Each Technology Information Kiosk recipient received the first and second series of CD-ROMs free of charge. The first series contains more than 1,000 information sources related to appropriate technology information such as tools and instruments for farmers and fishermen, animal husbandry, and so on, while the second series contains more than 2,000 information sources related to traditional medicine, medicinal plants, food recipes and so on. Most of the recipients have also produced their own CD-ROMs containing various aspects of local content such as tourism, traditional arts and so on (Hermawan and Saleh, 2002). Technology Information Kiosk recipients have expanded this service to communities including SMEs and have developed their own CD-ROMs in appropriate technology fields. Table II lists 20 Warintek recipients in the university sector.

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Figure 3 Some of the types of material digitised by the Universitas Parahyangan

3. Analysis Document digitisation as a stepping stone toward digital libraries began in ITB in 1998. The time lapse between the development of digital libraries in developed countries (early-mid-1990s) and in Indonesia is not so long and is very different from the situation with library automation activities. While many academic libraries in North America and Western Europe automated their library housekeeping activities in the early or mid-1970s, the academic libraries in Indonesia did not begin to use computers and software, such as Unesco’s freely available Micro CDS/ISIS, for their housekeeping activities until the mid or late 1980s (Ashford et al., 1992). As the digitisation projects in Indonesia proceed, many academic libraries have experienced constraints, including the following: . Technical. Many university infrastructures are unable to support document digitisation projects. With limited ICT facilities, some academic libraries have successfully digitised the documents. However, not all academic libraries are equipped with telephones or are connected to the Internet. Hence it is considered futile in some cases to digitise

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documents because of the limited accessibility to those digitised documents for users. Manpower. Digitising documents needs computer-literate library staff. However, many library staff in Indonesian academic libraries belong to the “techno-phobic” category. Not all library staff have enthusiastically supported ICT applications, such as the use of CDS/ISIS, especially the older generation who have a tendency to reject new technology. Publishing policy. There is no agreement on publishing policy for digitised documents among the university chancellors in Indonesia. Some chancellors are afraid of possible plagiarism and “cutting and pasting” of the work of other students, owing to the openness and accessibility of digitised documents. Those who belong to the “pro-digitisation” faction argue that by digitising the documents, there is increased social control, the “quality” of the institution is raised as the library is able to serve its users better, and there is a social advantage as more users can access the digitised documents. Cultural. Not every school or department in universities is ICT-conscious or ICT-literate. For example, at the Universitas Parahyangan

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Figure 4 Screenshot of contents of Surabaya memory project

Table II Warintek recipients in university libraries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Institution

Location

Province

Universitas Cenderawasih Universitas Negeri Semarang Universitas Tadulako Universitas Siliwangi Universitas Brawijaya Universitas Negeri Medan Universitas Lampung Universitas Katolik Soegijapranata Universitas Haluoleo IKIP Malang Universitas Negeri Jember Universitas Muhammadiyah Universitas Negeri Jenderal Soedirman Politeknik Jayadwipa Universitas Negeri Surakarta Universitas Muhammadiyah Ponorogo Universitas Negeri Surabaya Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Ekonomi Perbanas Universitas Kristen Satyawacana Universitas Wijaya Kusuma

Jayapura Semarang Kendari Tasikmalaya Malang Medan Bandarlampung Semarang Palu Malang Jember Yogya Purwokerto Ungaran Solo Ponorogo Surabaya Jakarta Salatiga Surabaya

Papua Central Java Central Sulawesi West Java East Java North Sumatera Lampung Central Java Southeast Sulawesi East Java East Java Yogya Central Java Central Java Central Java East Java East Java Jakarta Central Java East Java

(digitisation co-ordinator for APTIK) almost all the lecturers and students of the Department of Mathematics are ICT-literate, and so the library does not encounter any

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difficulties when requesting, through the Dean, that mathematics students submit their skripsis in electronic form. However, in other departments in the same university there is

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much ICT illiteracy, with the result that when the students submit their skripsis to the library (as required by university regulations), almost all of them are in hard-copy format and not in machine-readable format. For the predominantly paper-based library collections in Indonesia, many users claim that it is easier and more convenient to use printed materials rather than digital ones. However, behind this resistance – and hidden – is also “technology awkwardness” among users, including university lecturers! Digital divide. Although ICT was introduced in Indonesian libraries in the early 1980s, the enthusiasm for ICT is not well supported by social and economic conditions. Of the current population of 210 million people in Indonesia, there are only eight million telephone connections and 12 million cellular telephones. Internet users number about six million, or less than 4 per cent of the population. There is still a wide digital divide within Indonesia between those who have access to computer technology and the Internet and those who do not. Institutional. Many academic libraries have to struggle hard to find the budget for collection development, let alone for ICT-related activities. Although guidance issued by the Directorate General of Higher Education states that the academic library budget should be at least 5 per cent of the university budget (Directorate General of Higher Education, 1998), many Indonesian librarians doubt that it reaches that figure. Challenges of collecting documents to be digitised. Sukmana (2002) reported in 2002 that member libraries of the APTIK Library Network are not always enthusiastic in sending their documents on diskette to the Universitas Parahyangan Library in Bandung because the submission of machine-readable versions of skripsis to the libraries is not yet compulsory in their respective institutions. Hence, more than 90 per cent of the digitised documents in the APTIK Library Network are supplied by the co-ordinating institution.

The implementation of digital libraries among Indonesian academic libraries is developing. From the quantity point of view, the number of academic libraries participating in digital library activities is still very limited, and is dominated by universities located on the island of Java. Of 52 state universities, less than 50 per cent have been digitising their documents, while of about 1,500 private higher education institutions, less than 10 per cent have stated their intention to digitise their collections. In such a situation, the use of digital libraries for Indonesia is limited to a handful of

academic libraries mainly situated on the island of Java. In the not too distant future there is a possibility that the majority of academic libraries in Indonesia will maintain their paper-based collections, while others move towards a hybrid library and a few move towards digitising their documents. The same problems still emerge, i.e. how the implementation and usage of digital libraries will develop, what their future might be and what their budget will be. These are questions not just for Indonesian librarians, but for all of us.

4. Conclusion Activities related to digital libraries are relatively new in Indonesia and are relatively limited to academic libraries on the island of Java. Some academic libraries which have digitised their collections are still encountering various constraints.

References Ashford, J.H., Hariyadi, U. and Nanny, T.T. (1992), “An automated union catalogue for higher education in Indonesia: design studies for the Katalog Induk Perguruan Tinggi”, Program, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 139-55. Directorate General of Higher Education (1998), Perpustakaan Perguruan Tinggi (Guide for Academic Libraries Issued by the Directorate General of Higher Education), Direktorat Jenderal Pendidikan Tinggi, Jakarta. Fahmi, I. (2001), “Indonesia memasuki era perpustakaan digital”, Buletin FP2T, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 1-10. Fahmi, I. (2002), “The Indonesian digital library network is born to struggle with the digital divide”, International Information and Library Review, Vol. 34 No. 2, pp. 153-74. Hermawan, Y. and Saleh, A.R. (2002), “Pola pembinaan PTS dengan system kuatlemah: suatu pengalaman Warintek Universitas Siliwangi Tasikmalaya”, Forum Perpustakaan Perguruan Tinggi Jawa Barat, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 1-7. Pendit, P.L. (2002), “Inisiatif Pegembangan Maya: InCU-VL”, Seminar Sehari Mencari Format perpustakaan Digital, Denpasar, Bali. Rahardjo, A.I. (1999), “Jaringan Perpustakaan Maya, InCU-VL”, Seminar Peran Pustakawan Dalam menghadapi Era Millenium, Surabaya. Rahardjo, A.I. (2003), “InCU-VL (Indonesian Christian Universities – Virtual Library) – a vision”, available at: http://incuvl.petra.ac.id/vision.htm Sukmana, A. (2002), “Progress report: Digital Library Project”, working paper, APTIK Library Network Annual Meeting, Yogyakarta.

Further reading Sulistyo-Basuki, L. (2002), “Digital libraries as a stepping stone toward wider and better library co-operation and information network among academic libraries in the Asia Pacific region”, paper presented at the 8th Association of Universities in Asia Pacific Forum of Learning and Sharing, Denpasar, Bali.

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1. Context

Copyright, academic research and libraries: balancing the rights of stakeholders in the digital age Shalini R. Urs

The author Shalini R. Urs is Professor and Chairperson, Department of Information and Library Studies, University of Mysore, Manasagangotri, Mysore, India and is also Director, Vidyanidhi Digital Library.

Keywords Digital libraries, Copyright law, Intellectual property, Research

Abstract Following an overview of the historical context of copyright legislation, this paper discusses copyright within the scholarly communication process and the role of libraries in providing access to copyright materials in the digital age. The argument is made that the balance of “rights” and “exceptions” that has been maintained for 300 years needs to be reconsidered for scholarly communications, such as theses and dissertations, as well as for articles in electronic journals. This type of information is fact-based, often resulting from public funds, and is part of the intellectual heritage of academic institutions, and so is very different to creative works within the entertainment industries.

Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister

As libraries move from the physical medium to the digital, library staff are increasingly confronted with the challenges of addressing copyright and other intellectual property rights (IPR) issues related to digital information. Copyright has become a hot topic and a vexing issue for all those who have a stake in scholarship and scholarly communication. In the digital world, the very premises and philosophy of copyright are being questioned and voices are being heard reviewing its tenets. What is so different in the digital age that has made it an engaging topic for all the stakeholders in the scholarly communication process? Balancing conflicting “private” and “public” interests is neither easy nor unequivocal. This issue is further accentuated in the world of academic research, where the private and public concepts are very nebulous. The issue of rights ownership transgresses into the realm of hairsplitting issues of creativity, work for hire and other equally contentious matters. In the world of scholarship and intellectual heritage, libraries play a very important role: libraries are the voices for the “public good”. But, in the digital millennium, how do we balance often conflicting interests? How are libraries and library services affected? This paper attempts to examine copyright issues and their exceptions, especially in the context of academic research, with a view to highlight the issues that are of concern to libraries, scholarship and to society.

2. Intellectual property and copyright 2.1 The basics The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) of the United Nations defines intellectual property as: . . . creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. Intellectual property is divided into two categories: industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0033-0337.htm

Program: electronic library and information systems Volume 38 · Number 3 · 2004 · pp. 201-207 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0033-0337 DOI 10.1108/00330330410547250

Received: 12 March 2004 Revised: 5 April 2004 Accepted: 9 April 2004 All the URLs in this paper were checked on 6 April 2004.

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their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs (www.wipo.int/ about-ip/en/).

The challenges of intellectual property issues stem from their very nature – their value increases with use, and the value of intellectual property lies in public use! Unlike other economic goods, market forces that operate in this domain are not purely economic. Knowledge is not of much value if it is not disseminated. The fact that it is not consumed but catalyses the creation of new knowledge compounds the issue further. The history of copyright can be traced back to 1662, when the concept was developed to protect publishers against piracy following the technological advances of the day, which enabled cheap and easy printing of books. The world’s first copyright legislation was the UK Copyright Act of 1709, sometimes referred to as the Statute of Queen Anne, which passed into law in 1710 and introduced the concepts of the author being the owner of the copyright of the created work and there being a fixed term of protection for published works. In addition, there was a legal obligation for copies of published books in the UK to be deposited in certain libraries, including the university libraries of Cambridge and Oxford. Copyright tradition has evolved mainly for creating an environment that promotes creativity and knowledge. The forces and incentives that help produce creative or intellectual works are diverse. The antecedent of the Statute of Queen Anne was the Royal patent grants, which offered printers and booksellers monopoly rights to publish books and the like. The original purpose was to exercise central authority to control publishing and generate tax revenue. The Statute of Queen Anne was designed to encourage people to produce creative works, but the UK’s House of Lords also viewed these creative works as for the public good, and hence monopoly rights were strictly limited – originally to 28 years. Copyright is concerned with the rights of authors, composers, artists and other creators in their works. Copyright grants them the right, for a limited period of time, to authorise or prohibit certain uses of their works by others. These rights encompass basically two aspects – economic and moral. The main aim of copyright is to provide a stimulus for creativity – ensuring economic returns on the creation and protection from violation of the creation. Moral rights generally cover the right of “paternity” by which authors have the right to claim authorship of their works, ensuring that their names are mentioned in connection with them. It is interesting to note that etymologically the term “author” means “father”. The right of integrity is another dimension of the copyright. The spirit behind the concept of

copyright is enshrined and exemplified in the United States Constitution, which provides that Congress has the power to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and their discoveries” (Besek, 2003). Within national territories, copyright protection is provided by national laws. International protection has been provided since 1886 through the International Copyright Act and the Berne Convention (see www.cerebalaw.com/berne.htm), which has over 100 countries as signatories and is managed by WIPO. The Berne Convention provides for a minimum level of copyright protection. The freedom for individual countries to regulate for certain issues, and regulate more than what is provided for in the Berne Convention, has resulted in a variety of different copyright legislations among signatories of the Convention. Any original work of authorship fixed in a “tangible medium of expression” is automatically copyrighted. The medium can be almost anything – paper, discs, clay, film, sound recording, video, digital data and so on. Originality has never been defined very precisely. However, to qualify as “original” it has to be something that is not copied and has to exhibit a small amount of creativity. Copyright legislation does not protect ideas and facts – whether scientific, historical, biographical or other happenings of the day. Any facts that an author discovers in the course of research is public domain information, i.e. free for public use. Copyright is owned by the creators, their assignees, or their employers, and official registration of copyright is unnecessary. Copyright is limited in time – it generally covers the life of the author and a said number of years (varying from country to country). Copyright is in essence a bundle of rights covering the following: . Rights for reproduction, i.e. exclusive rights to make copies of the work. For the purposes of this right, a copy of any work can be in any form in which the work is fixed and from which it can be perceived, reproduced or communicated either directly or with the help of a machine. . Rights for modification/adaptation, i.e. exclusive rights to modify and make adaptations and create derivative works. A work in a different medium such as, say, a film as compared to a book, is an adaptation or a derivative. . Rights for distribution, i.e. the rights distribute the work to the public. . Rights for public performance, i.e. the right to recite, play, dance, or act with or without the aid of a machine.

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Rights for public display, i.e. the right to display the work anywhere that is open to the public (anywhere that a substantial number of persons outside the normal circle of a family and social acquaintances are gathered).

Authors and creators are granted certain monopoly rights over their works in order that these assurances of returns on their efforts stimulate the creation of intellectual works. Limits and the exceptions to these rights (as described later) promote the arts and the sciences. Copyright laws also permit transfer of rights to a third party, such as publishers, in order that they can bring the works of the authors/creators to the market. A sense of balance is implicit in the provisions of copyright. One of the critical principles of copyright policies is to help equalise, leverage, and balance rights. Apart from fair use and doctrine of first sale, another underlying element of copyright has been the “limited time” factor, thus ensuring that eventually all works become “public domain”. The Guide to Regional Intellectual Property Laws for Librarians (Baker and McKenzie, 2002), produced under the auspices of CONSAL, helps those working in libraries and knowledge centres in the CONSAL region to understand new and emerging issues in IPR and copyright management.

2.2 Exceptions to copyright with respect to libraries Copyright is not absolute. There are a number of limiting principles and exceptions to the rights. Those principles that are relevant for libraries in the digital age are listed below: (1) Archiving and copying. Libraries and archives are permitted to make up to three copies of unpublished copyrighted works for the purposes of preservation, security or for deposit for research use in another library or archive. Libraries can also make up to three copies of a published work to replace a work in their collection if it is damaged, deteriorated or lost, or the format of which has become obsolete. (2) Fair use. What constitutes “fair use” is debatable. However there are certain factors that govern fair use: . Purpose and character of use, i.e. is it for commercial use or for non-profit educational purposes? . Nature of the copyrighted work. The fair use principle is generally more lenient for fact-based works than it is for “fanciful” works, and also is broader for published works than it is for unpublished works. . Amount or proportion of the whole that is to be copied.

Effect that the use has on market potential or the value of the copyrighted work. (3) First sale doctrine. The matter of disposition of a particular copy of a copyright is limited by the first sale doctrine, according to which the owner of that particular copy of the work may sell or transfer that copy. Libraries’ lending and marketing of used books are governed by the first sale doctrine. .

Issues and concerns are complicated by the difficulty of defining what constitutes a “copy” in the digital age. The first copy may be the only copy for which the copyright receives an economic return. The paranoia of the holders of copyright stems from this fear of losing the market and the right to distribute (Giavarra, 1999). There are understandable concerns of users, including those of libraries, regarding loss of their rights as provided for in the above “exceptions”.

3. Scholarly communication, copyright, libraries and preservation of intellectual heritage The role that libraries play in the scholarly communication process is shaped by the provisions of the copyright. There are essentially three players: (1) the creators, who have legal rights; (2) the publishers, who have legal rights due to transfer; and (3) the users (individuals and institutions such as libraries and academe), who have legal rights through exceptions and limits. Authors produce creative and intellectual works while the publishers create a market and distribute and sell the works. The functions of libraries have been well defined over the years – collection, preservation, organisation and dissemination of works of intellectual and artistic content in order to facilitate their use. One of the important distinctions between the roles of other intermediaries and libraries is the preservation function. Historically, libraries, as social and cultural institutions, have the mandate not only to ensure equity of access and availability to the present generation of users, but also have the responsibility of ensuring that access and availability for future users. Libraries acquire, preserve, lend and provide access to works, including those that have lost market viability or are out of print. Often libraries are the only agencies that preserve public domain materials. Libraries are the facilitators that enable users to exercise their rights to access copyrighted as well as public domain works. This system seems to have

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worked fairly successfully for nearly 300 years. The role of libraries in the preservation of digital information sources is discussed later.

communication culture. Questions are also being raised regarding the tenets of the system of copyright for a variety of other reasons. The complexities, conflicts and confusions relating to copyright in the domain of scholarship arise from our failure to separate the different categories of intellectual property – one size does not fit all. Grouping all created works under a single folder results in a diverse set of works coming under the umbrella of the same copyright legal system. Intellectual academic research works and creative/ artistic works clearly meant for commercial purposes are all treated under the same rules. Why is there a need for distinguishing scholarly academic works from works meant for the entertainment industry? Arguments for separating the two categories of works are presented below: . Scholarly works are cumulative. Each work in essence is just a link in the scholarship continuum. The edifice of scientific disciplines is built on the foundations laid by generations of scientists over centuries. It should to be remembered that when the Statute of Queen Anne was enacted, it was clearly meant for literary works and not scientific works. The act of using information and creating information are so closely intertwined, it is almost impossible to separate the two. Academics claim “fair use” for using information. Then is it fair to claim copyright for the act of creating information based on earlier work? . Ideas are not “copyrightable”. According to the present copyright laws, it is the representations of ideas that are copyright, and not the ideas themselves. This clearly reflects the fact that copyright laws are specially tuned to an abstract level not meant for scientific/scholarly works (which are essentially focused on communicating ideas rather than expressing ideas). The essence of scholarly communication is the message rather than the language, which is only a conduit for conveyance. A scholarly work is valued for the ideas that it contains rather than the expressions of those ideas. Therefore, copyright laws which confer rights on the expression of an idea are clearly not intended for scholarly works. . Institutionalisation of, and public funding for, scholarship. Scholarship is an institutional enterprise in most cases. Almost all academic research is carried out within institutional frameworks. Individual researchers are supported by public funds either directly or indirectly. Though intellectual works are created by an individual, it is rather difficult to separate this from the institutional support

4. Copyright in the digital age: a threat to the cultural ecology? What is different in the digital age? Copyright laws are an instrument of balancing the interests of creators and the societal obligations to facilitate the free flow of information. Advances in technology (including “player pianos” in the early 20th century, cable television, computers and the Internet) have demanded a review and reworking of the copyright laws. For 300 years fairly discernible boundaries between the players/ creators and end users/consumers in the scholarly communication process were drawn, and apparently conflicting interests could be fairly gracefully accommodated. But the digitally networked world has threatened this cultural ecology and has dramatically shifted the balance with the ability to download materials, to make any number of perfect copies and distribute these with virtually no extra cost or effort. Creators feel threatened and have become paranoid in view of the threat to their market potential, and so technology is being used to enable copyright holders to exercise enormous restrictions and controls over use. Safeguarding the private and public interests has been reduced to a win or lose situation. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 in the US is one such example (see www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf) which has endangered the legitimate “fair use” of creative works. Retaining the balance between public and private concerns is the key to addressing the challenge of achieving an equilibrium of intellectual property rights. The library community has often been the champion of the cause of “public good”, and has traditionally been the agency that has offered opportunities for the public to benefit from copyrighted and public domain materials. Therefore it is natural that the library and information professions are concerned that this balance is maintained in the digital environment. Libraries act in the vanguard of maintaining the cultural ecosystem.

5. Copyright and academic research: issues and arguments It is not the digital age alone that is causing imbalances in the ecology of scholarly

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and infrastructure behind the research. This is especially so in increasingly infrastructurebased research activities. Most of the time, researchers are paid for their academic work. The music, movie and other entertainment industries work on a very different structure, and hence perhaps demand the very restrictive and protectionist copyright system that exists today. Moral aspects of scholarship should be the central axial principle of scholarly works. Creators are generally more concerned about “paternity” of works than expecting economic returns. Authors are responsible for the validity of their writings and also should protect their moral rights, in terms of acknowledgments and citations. In scholarship, rewards are based on credit and other intellectual dimensions, and should not be economic. In fact the culture of scholarship has evolved such a system of rewards. Current copyright laws distinguish between “fact-based” and fanciful works. Copyright is not applicable for fact-based works. Most academic research is fact-based and not fanciful, and therefore strictly speaking does not come under the provisions of the present copyright laws. It may also be noted that the definition of intellectual property by WIPO given earlier does not explicitly cover “scholarly works” as it defines “creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce [. . .] which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures”. The economic interests are not the ones to govern scholarship. In fact it is difficult to answer the question of who owns academic research. Lack of copyright laws for oral traditions. In oral traditions, before the advent of easy replication afforded by printing technologies, the concept of copyright did not exist. It is the act of “fixing” an idea in a particular medium that brings up the question of copyright. Maybe it is time that we turn around and argue that the digital medium is not a “fixed” medium, and hence we should question the validity of applying the principles of the print paradigm. In the print world ideas were fixed into a medium/container for the purposes of distribution. But today, distribution does not happen in a “fixed mode” but takes place in a fluid state. It is archiving that “fixes” the content and costs more than distribution, particularly for maintenance of the archive. It perhaps makes good sense to evolve an

altogether different model for the conceptual system of copyright – one based on the archive model and not the distribution-based business model. Although it appears to be very revolutionary, given the restrictive abilities that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) software can impose, it is worthwhile to consider and revisit copyright laws from a fresh perspective of “archiving” rights rather than “copying” rights. Since the technology exists to make perfect copies that can be easily distributed, and DRM software and other technologies enable the rights holders to restrict the “life” and “use” of digital materials, it is possible to conceptualise a model restricting the archiving/life of a copy of digital material by permitting only those who have rights to archive.

6. Libraries, archiving and preservation issues in the digital age Closely tied to the issues of copyright with respect to digital information is the archiving and preservation of digital resources. Digital materials do not lend themselves easily to some of the provisions of copyright laws, such as “doctrine of first sale”. As we move from subscription/ purchase-based models to access/licence-based models, the issue of first sale becomes difficult to formulate and indefinable. E-journals, for instance, can present many controversial issues for libraries related to the ownership and preservation of the digital medium and determination of the roles and responsibilities for maintaining the digital archive. Some very interesting and vexing questions are raised. For example, during the reports from the Association of College and Research Libraries/Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition at the American Library Association Meeting in January 2003 (http://library.ucsc.edu/science/ELD/2003/ reports2003.html), the audience was asked “Just why are libraries involved in subscribing to e-journal sites when the e-journals are not residing in the library and are being used largely outside the library?” Libraries now rely on, and spend a lot of money on, digital assets that they neither own nor manage. A joint statement by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the International Publishers Association clearly states that “while publishers can generally ensure short term archiving of their publications so long as these are economically viable, libraries are best placed to take the responsibility for long term archiving through appropriate arrangements with publishers” (IFLA and IPA, 2002).

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The digital medium itself is deeply mired in legitimate concerns about the technological obsolescence and endurance of the medium. Questions have been raised about the issues of policies and technologies for preservation. Traditionally the preservation of scholarship has been a function of libraries. In the print paradigm, publishers were not bothered about preservation while libraries took great pains to preserve, and in many academic institutions issues of journals may be bound into volumes and remain accessible for users, via the library archive, long after the journal has ceased publication. In the digital paradigm this function is slowly shifting to the publishers. The issues that compound the fact are the problem of lack of infrastructure and the wherewithal in libraries to undertake preservation and the software required for searching and accessing the archive that is developed at considerable cost by the publishers. From the libraries’ perspective, e-journals that exist only on publishers’ servers may be subject to corruption, sabotage, subsequent alteration and selective preservation. Libraries are concerned that publishers, driven by market and profit forces, are not the right agencies to be entrusted with the responsibility of preservation. Apprehensions centre around the perception that publishers may be reluctant to invest and reinvest in archiving older materials once commercial viability diminishes or is lost (Webster, 2002). The issues of mergers, closedowns and take-overs are other matters of contention. Libraries have been the guardians of societal intellectual inheritance, but in the digital age this appears to be changing, especially in respect of e-journals. Libraries need to advocate and champion the cause of restoring/retaining this traditional responsibility. It is heartening to note that there have been initiatives and efforts in this direction. For instance, the initiative of the National Library of The Netherlands and Elsevier Science (see www.kb.nl/kb/resources/frameset_kb.html?/kb/pr/ pers/pers2002/elsevier-en.html) perhaps addresses the archiving issue to the satisfaction of both the publishing and the library community. This initiative is an example of encouraging publishers to commit to a well-defined preservation policy. In August 2002, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) of The Netherlands and Elsevier Science signed an agreement whereby KB would become the official digital archive for Elsevier Science’s 1,500 journals. This is an interesting development which is worth emulating as it evokes the traditional role of the library in undertaking preservation responsibilities while also asserting the commercial role of the publisher. Such a system potentially provides the assurance and trust required by

libraries that the content they are licensing will be retained over time, while at the same time letting publishers exercise and enjoy their commercial rights.

7. Copyright and theses and dissertations Copyright issues related to academic research output in the form of theses and dissertations are very murky. Commercial publishers do not come into play directly, but there are publishing concerns of the creators that can affect copyright aspects. The competing parties are not the scholarly community and publishers, but are within academia. The views expressed in this paper are partly the result of work in developing policy frameworks for creating a national archive in India of theses and dissertations in the Vidyanidhi Digital Library Project (www.vidyanidhi.org.in). Most of the copyright issues related to scholarly communication apply equally to the world of theses and dissertations. Further factors such as those outlined below underscore the case for separating scholarly works from entertainment in respect of copyright. They include: . Support by public funds. Doctoral research is almost invariably funded by governments and other such funding agencies, both directly in the form of fellowships as well as indirectly in the form of infrastructure support. . Collaboration. Theses and dissertations involve collaboration between researchers, academic supervisors and the academic support system in the form of the review and examination of the research. . Lack of formal publication. Theses and dissertations are unpublished works as they may or may not be published at all and hence almost lost to scholarship, as access would be severely limited. The provisions of compulsory licensing may also be made applicable in order to archive doctoral works digitally. . Intellectual heritage. Theses and dissertations of research students are part of the intellectual heritage of the academic institution in which the work is undertaken. . Public defence convention. The tradition of a doctoral student defending the thesis in public implies that doctoral research works should be made publicly accessible. The Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) movement the world over (www.theses.org) has raised very pertinent issues with regard to the archiving of and access to this form of literature,

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and fundamental questions regarding who owns doctoral research works have been raised. Once again, perhaps, certain generic principles outlined above help guide us in gracefully accommodating the concerns of all stakeholders. Libraries are within their limits in digitally archiving and providing access to theses.

8. Conclusion Perhaps the time is ripe for separating the copyright issues for scholarly works from “entertainment” works. The paradigms that govern, or should govern, scholarly works are moral aspects rather than economic aspects. The fundamental distinction of academic research is that it is “fact-based”, publicly supported, and is part of the intellectual heritage and should tilt the balance in favour of “public good” concerns rather than private interests, and thus be freed from the copyright quagmire.

References Baker and McKenzie (2002), Guide to Regional Intellectual Property Laws for Librarians., National Library Board, Singapore. Besek, J.M. (2003), Copyright Issues Relevant to the Creation of a Digital Archive: A Preliminary Assessment, Council on Library and Information Resources and Library of Congress, Washington DC, available at: www.clir.org/ pubs/reports/pub112/contents.html Giavarra, E. (1999), “Copyright, libraries and the digital environment”, European Copyright User Platform and Current Awareness Campaign for Librarians (Annex), European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations, The Hague, available at: http://www.eblida.org/ecup/docs/fi_reannex10.htm IFLA and IPA (2002), “Preserving the memory of the world in perpetuity: a joint statement on the archiving and preservation of digital information”, available at: www.ifla.org/V/press/ifla-ipa02.htm Webster, D. (2002), The Practical Realities of the New Copyright Laws: A Librarian’s Perspective, Association of Research Libraries, New York, NY, available at: www.arl.org/info/frn/ copy/websterMLA02.html

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News (Most items in this section have been contributed by suppliers. Publication does not imply endorsement by Emerald, Aslib or the Editorial Board, of any claims made.)

News from the British Library British Library launches a Web site with sound recordings of Northern English accents and dialects Northern England’s rich assortment of accents and dialects are featured on a new Web site from the British Library. Visitors to the site can listen to the incredible variety of spoken English in the north, and hear sounds and words which define the people from the area (www.collectbritain.co.uk/ collections/dialects/). The site brings together two large sound archives of Northern English speakers made 50 years apart and puts them on the Web for the first time. There are over 11 hours of recordings and users can hear how Northerners spoke in the 1950s, and how they speak now with the words in each recording being explained. They reflect not only ways of speaking but also ways of life that have changed forever, making the site a treasure trove of local and social history. These recordings are just the first set of accents and dialects going on to the Web site. The Web site will interest specialists and non-specialists alike and should prove invaluable to the large number of actors who currently use the British Library Sound Archive for research purposes. The accents and dialects Web site sits within the British Library’s Collect Britain Web site (www.collectbritain.co.uk) funded with money from the New Opportunities Fund. When the site is complete in September 2004 it will contain over 100,000 images and 350 hours of sound recordings. For further information please contact Colin Beesley, British Library Press Office, Boston Spa, Wetherby, West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ, UK. Tel: +44(0) 1937 546 825; Fax: +44(0) 1937 546 571; E-mail: [email protected]; URL: www.bl.uk

Information Environment (IE), based on the TalisPrism Web services architecture. This will create links between the University’s locally developed managed learning environment (MLE) and the Talis system, providing a gateway to e-resources – including e-journals, the library catalogue, the Internet and internal resources (such as examination papers) for its 25,000 students and faculty. University of Derby staff are firm believers in the importance of student-centred learning and electronic access to information resources. Evaluated by the University against other leading suppliers in the UK higher education market, Talis IE’s easy integration opportunities and Web services technology gave it the edge. Third party support of this came from discussion with other Talis customers involved with the IE developments, including the University of Sunderland, a recent implementer of Talis. Derby’s information system staff will be making use of the flexibility of the Talis enabling platform to extend the library management system to integrate with other systems. Later in 2004 the University will go live with TalisPrism for resource discovery and access to library catalogues, local and networked information and Internet resources whether on or off campus, along with Talis Alto – the new library management system. Self-service enablers including TalisMessage for loan renewals and TalisList for resource list management will enable staff to give more attention to individual advice and less on time-consuming administrative tasks. Automated self issue will follow in a second phase during 2004-5. For more information about the University of Derby’s library see Brewer, G., “The University of Derby Electronic Library: a case study of some economic and academic aspects of a local digitised collection”, Program, Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 30-37, 2002. For further information please contact Talis Information Ltd, Birmingham Research Park, Vincent Drive, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2SQ, UK. Tel: +44(0) 121 471 1179; Fax: +44(0) 121 472 0298; E-mail: [email protected]; URL: www.talis.com

News from Ex Libris News from Talis University of Derby opts for Talis Information Environment to integrate managed learning environment and library systems To create a single gateway into its managed learning environment and library resources, the University of Derby has chosen the Talis

The Royal Library of Belgium chooses DigiTool from Ex Libris Ex Libris (France) has announced that the Royal Library of Belgium has chosen to implement the DigiTool digital asset management system to control and enable sharing of its collection of electronic publications.

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The implementation of DigiTool will be conducted by Dr Guido Goedeme´, Head of the Royal Library’s Section of Automated Documentation. “DigiTool was chosen above the other systems researched due to its functionality in the construction of electronic publications archives, which can be enjoyed through the userfriendly Web OPAC. We see Ex Libris’s experience with national libraries as well as its experience with library management systems as welcome assets”, commented De Goedeme´, who has been responsible for the electronic publication of the Belgian Bibliography since 1998. The Belgian law, dating from 1965, that pertains to the legal deposit of printed documents will be extended to include electronic publications in the near future. The Royal Library of Belgium is the country’s national library, and is responsible for the collection, preservation and availability of documents published in Belgium, about Belgium, or by Belgians abroad. In addition to being an important scientific library, it also possesses rich collections of modern scientific publications, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, maps, globes, and coins. Ex Libris is a leading worldwide developer and provider of high-performance applications for libraries, information centres and researchers. Ex Libris’s ALEPH integrated library solution has been installed at over 800 sites and consortia in 50 countries. MetaLib, the information portal for library collections, and SFX, the context-sensitive link server for heterogeneous electronic resources in the scholarly information environment, have been adopted by more than 450 institutions in 30 countries. The DigiTool product, for the construction of digital collections as a component of an overall digital strategy, rounds out the Ex Libris product suite. For further information please contact Ex Libris (UK) Ltd, Bridge House, 119-23 Station Rd, Hayes, Middlesex UB3 4BX. Tel: +44(0) 20 8561 5614; Fax: +44(0) 20 8561 5634; E-mail: [email protected]; URL: www.exlibrisgroup.com

News from Innovative

to knowledge and information management on campus. In 2003, the group launched a re-computerisation project that will be completed in mid-2005. The University is located at four sites and some of the SCD’s 60 staff members are situated at all the sites. The SCD plan is for a total re-organisation of the University’s information assets. The acquisition of a coherent library system with integrated components and functions was the primary goal. Another key objective entailed the creation of a portal to provide a flexible, integrated display of the University’s information resources. In comparisons between systems conducted during the Request for Proposal process, Millennium emerged as the most appropriate system to replace the previous MultiLIS system because it: . had extensive functionality; . had adaptable modules; and . functions as an integrated system. Innovative is partnering with a local service provider, the Jouve Company, to deliver Web services. Belonging to a group of mid-sized multidisciplinary establishments in France, Universite´ de Valenciennes offers degrees in business, law, technology, the arts, science, and social sciences and hosts 11,000 students. The institution has a long tradition of innovation and is renowned as a pilot school by the European System of Higher Education. Universidade de Coimbra Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal has a long and rich tradition, having been established in 1290. The library co-ordinates the Sistema Integrado de Informac¸a˜o Bibliogra´fica (the database of the University of Coimbra), to which 24 diverse faculty libraries and study institutes contribute. The library has been using the Libertas system since 1996. Millennium was chosen for its: . operational flexibility; . ease of handling a great volume of data; . compatibility; and . excellent Web OPAC for library users. The library is a public, national and academic library containing one million volumes and an impressive array of archive materials, including some of the oldest surviving books, dating from before 1501.

Innovative expands its presence in Europe Innovative Interfaces has announced that Millennium has been selected by several prestigious European universities or projects. Although the libraries vary in size, language and technology needs, the Innovative team worked to provide tailored solutions for each. Universite´ de Valenciennes Service Commun de Documentation (SCD) at Universite´ de Valenciennes in France is committed

Universitaria de Huelva Since its founding in 1994, the Biblioteca Universitaria de Huelva in Spain has provided the essential service of supporting teaching and research, while enhancing the campus environment.

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The library will be migrating from an existing Sabini system, and Millennium was the definitive choice for the following reasons: . the need for latest-generation technology, functionality and features; . Millennium’s adaptability to new technological challenges as they present themselves; . desirable features for patrons; and . Innovative’s track record in both the United States and southern Europe, in places such as the Consortium of Libraries at Andalucia. The library serves nearly 14,000 patrons at seven outlets: a central library, three campus libraries, and three large study halls. The library makes available 182,000 monographs, 4,100 periodical subscriptions, 4,500 electronic serials, 84 databases, and 6,500 multimedia sources. Flemish Library Consortium The Flemish Centre for Public Libraries (VCOB) will implement a central cataloguing project using Millennium, and Ardatis, Innovative’s partner and local systems integration provider, will provide implementation and support assistance. Scheduled for release in the fall of 2004, library users using Millennium’s OPAC will be able to consult the collections of over 300 Dutch-language public libraries in five regions across Flanders. The first implementation phase will include a database of the six largest Flemish libraries and an additional number of pilot libraries. This will be followed by public Web access to a single database of 40 million records forming the Flemish Union Catalogue which will be available to two million library users and will serve as an efficient working instrument for more than 4,000 librarians. Innovative held up to an intense screening process conducted by VCOB’s board of directors, representing city, county and provincial levels of Flemish government. The committee submitted 3,500 requirements (over 800 pages) involving functionality, planning, and service warranty. To Innovative’s credit, approval was unanimous. The Board chose Millennium for many reasons, including: . its reliability; . its extensive compatibility with international information technology; and . its compatibility with specific library standards. In addition, Innovative will be providing customised features for its Belgian clients to allow easy Web-based cataloguing for libraries contributing records to the database. The Innovative team will develop a method for library users to view aggregate results when searching for a work with many manifestations (such as Hamlet),

through the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) standard and this will also be used to optimise the cataloguing of classical music recordings. The Millennium server runs on UNIX (in this case a Solaris platform) with an Oracle RDBMS data model. All libraries will catalogue over intranet or Internet via a Java-client or a simplified Web interface. Celebrating 25 years of partnership with the library community, Innovative Interfaces is a leader in providing Web-powered, Java-based automated library systems. Its flagship product offering, Millennium, is installed in thousands of libraries in 39 countries. The company is headquartered in Emeryville, California, with offices in Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Korea, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand and the UK. For further information please contact Innovative Interfaces, 3 York Court, Upper York St, Bristol BS2 8QF, UK. Tel: +44(0) 117 975 1021; Fax: +44(0) 117 924 4367; E-mail: [email protected]; URL: www.iii.com

News from Endeavor London School of Economics and Political Science select Endeavor suite of systems Endeavor Information Systems has announced that the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) selected a suite of Endeavor’s systems to provide interoperability for users, accessibility for library materials and the basis for future library advancements. LSE has selected the Voyager integrated library management system and the Voyager integrated interlibrary loan module, plus the Voyager interface to self-check systems. It has also selected the ENCompass for Resource Access system for providing instant access to e-resources and the LinkFinderPlus OpenURL-enabled link resolver for bridging the gap between citations and online full text of articles. Endeavor’s digital systems will help to manage and make available the library’s 3,000 e-journal subscriptions. The LSE Library is the largest in the world devoted exclusively to the social sciences. It serves more than one million visitors each year and holds over 90,000 historical pamphlets and four million printed items, including 31,000 past and present journal titles. The Library collects material worldwide in all major European languages and is recognised internationally for its specialist research collection. The Library archives hold items relating to British political, economic and social

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history, social anthropology and the history of philosophy.

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Global Data Change Task Force provides insight to create future technology Endeavor Information Systems has announced the ongoing work of an Endeavor customer task force, set to examine the issues in today’s changing library. This most recent task force, Endeavor’s Global Data Change Task Force, examines the needs of libraries to manipulate data in MARC records to better adapt to a changing library environment. Through this task force, Endeavor will be able to provide even more workflow flexibility for libraries using the Voyager integrated library management system. “Library collections were once relatively static – items were continually added, but there was not a large influence of other changes”, explained Shelley Hostetler, Voyager Product Manager for Endeavor. “For example, since print journal collections are being replaced by electronic backfiles, the print copies are moving from the library shelves to remote storage. Also, adherence to the MARC 21 standard requires changes to existing data elements. All in all, the need for global data changes is increasing. With the Global Data Change Task Force, Endeavor will examine the current challenges and anticipate future needs. The result will be flexible features in the Voyager ILS to allow library staff, whether in acquisitions, serials, cataloguing or in other areas, to react immediately to the variety of demands presented. Voyager’s architecture, including the design behind Voyager’s Oracle-based database, puts Endeavor in a strong position to demonstrate best practices in this area. Libraries will benefit from flexible workflows, many points of access, and a collection that reflects the changing face of the library.” The Global Data Change Task Force members represent diverse institutions, including members from four countries. The members each bring unique expertise in knowledge of the MARC standard and cataloguing best practices. Some members also bring experience in building local technical solutions over and beyond the Voyager offerings, professionals who take advantage of the open architecture of Voyager to create technical solutions for their institution’s specific needs. The members represent the following institutions: . Library of Congress, Washington, DC; . University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; . Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; . Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia;

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Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, Kentucky; The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas; University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; and University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.

Endeavor unveils ENCompass for Journals OnSite Endeavor Information Systems has announced the development of ENCompass for Journals OnSite (EJOS), an advanced system that provides a single point of access for the storage, searching and browsing of locally held journal content from multiple publishers. A progressive step in Endeavor’s vision for the digital library, EJOS gives libraries the ability to load and store e-journal content from a variety of publishers, and empowers users with a single point of access for searching and browsing across journal content from diverse publishers. EJOS supports local storage of full-text journal content from more than 20 diverse publishers and provides the unmatched searching and collection management capabilities from Endeavor’s ENCompass system for managing, searching and linking collections. With EJOS, Endeavor takes another step into the creation of reliable tools for digital asset management. EJOS is the ideal solution for large institutions that would like to provide local hosting for large collections of commercial and local e-journals. The system provides local control of licensed journal content, enabling large research institutions or consortia to create a permanent repository for the archiving and preservation of e-journal content. Locally hosted journals provide security and confidentiality for certain institutions, as well as new opportunities for customisation and integration that other methods of journal access do not allow or support. Endeavor’s EJOS includes several specific features to accommodate large scale and unique needs. By converting journal metadata from different publishers into a standard format, EJOS enables libraries to store all owned e-journal content in one location, providing easy access for users. Full text is stored in the format provided by the publisher, typically as portable document format. To accommodate content from so many publishers, EJOS is designed to host terabytes of data. EJOS features a newly designed user interface to provide an easy and fast end-user experience. Created with input from the Elsevier User Centred Design Group, experts in the field of interface design, the new EJOS interface allows end users to

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search across content from all licensed publishers. Equally important, end users can browse through all licensed journal content from the journal title or category all the way down to the article level. Endeavor Information Systems, based in Des Plaines, Illinois, was founded in 1994. A wholly owned subsidiary of Elsevier, Endeavor offers a complete line of library solutions for traditional and digital collections. For further information please contact Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., 84 Theobald’s Road, London, WC1X 8RR, UK. Tel: +44(0) 20 7611 4500; Fax: +44(0) 20 7611 4501; E-mail: [email protected]; URL: www. endinfosys.com

24 Hour Museum announces Culture Online City Heritage Guides The 24 Hour Museum is set to launch a series of Web guides to the museums, galleries and heritage of ten English cities. “Analysis of how our users search the site shows they look for city-based content”, explains Jane Finnis, 24 Hour Museum Director. “This new project aims to address this need and use the reputation and popularity of our existing site to bring in new audiences for unique city-based content”. The ten cities selected as the subjects of these first heritage guides are: Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Norwich. City Heritage Guides have been commissioned by the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) initiative Culture Online.The City Heritage Guides will be fed automatically from the listings information museums and galleries already post on the 24 Hour Museum site. This live information will be supplemented by specially written news stories and features put together by the 24 Hour Museum editorial team, working in partnership with cultural groups, museum professionals and journalism students in each city. Partnerships have been struck with exemplary national and local organisations:

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Curiosity and Imagination (www.centresforcuriosity.org.uk); Children’s Express (www.childrensexpress.org); and My Brighton and Hove (www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk).

The project team will encourage contributions from local history groups, children’s after-school clubs, museum Saturday clubs and cultural groups from ethnic communities often bypassed by mainstream museum culture. Group leaders and members will be able to put their own online historical and cultural trails together using a simple online authoring system called Storymaker. Downloads of trail content in appropriate translations will be offered where community groups whose first language is not English have offered content. 24 Hour Museum (24HM), set up in 1999, is funded by the DCMS through the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). The 24 Hour Museum City Heritage Guides are funded by the DCMS’s Culture Online initiative and the database contains information on around 3,000 UK museums, galleries and heritage sites. The site currently attracts over 220,000 visitor sessions per month (average duration of visit ten minutes). The linked children’s site (www.show.me.uk), funded by the Clore Duffield Foundation was launched in November 2003 and currently attracts more than 30,000 visitors per month. Culture Online aims to: . enhance access to the arts for children and young people and give them the opportunity to develop their talents to the full; . open up our cultural institutions to the wider community, to promote lifelong learning and social cohesion; . extend the reach of new technologies and build IT skills; and . support wider and richer engagement and learning by all adults. For further information please contact Jon Pratty. Tel: +44(0) 12 7382 0044; E-mail: editor@ 24hourmuseum.org.uk; URL: www.museum. org.uk

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Reviews Information Representation and Retrieval in the Digital Age Heting Chu Information Today, Inc., for the American Society for Information Science and Technology Medford, NJ 2003 248 pp. ISBN 1 57387 172 9 $35.60 Keywords Information retrieval, Modelling, Information systems, Search engines Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547269

Lancaster, and I am happy to add my welcome for this text, which should be useful for students, teachers and professionals in information science. Brian Vickery Emeritus Professor, Oxford, UK

Transforming Serials: The Revolution Continues, Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. 17th Annual Conference, June 20-23, 2002

This is a helpful introductory text on retrieval from computer-based sources – online systems and the Internet. Dr Chu, who received her first degree at Peking University, now teaches at Long Island University, USA. Her book is aimed basically at information science students, though it can also be of general interest to the profession. The work has a wide coverage. There are two chapters on information representation, followed by one on language in information representation and retrieval. Retrieval techniques and query representation is followed by retrieval approaches (searching and browsing). There are then discussions of information models and information systems, and a chapter on special problems such as multilingual, multimedia and hypertext retrieval. A chapter on users (in particular, user-system interaction) is followed by one on evaluation, and the book ends with a brief account of artificial intelligence in retrieval. Dr Chu concentrates on the facilities offered by retrieval methods to users, rather than on the technical details of information system construction. She does not provide much in the way of illustrative examples, and her discussion of intellectual problems involved in, say, categorisation in information representation or retrieval performance evaluation, is relatively brief. The virtues of the book are that it is clearly and simply written, and that the author has put a great deal of thought into considering the advantages and disadvantages for the user of the various retrieval methods. She has an up-to-date knowledge of Internet developments, and the references at the end of each chapter are good leads into the literature of the field. The cover of the book carries a commendatory message from Wilf

Edited by Susan L. Scheiberg and Shelley Neville The Haworth Information Press New York, NY, London and Oxford 2002 365 pp. ISBN 0 7890 2281 8 (hbk), 0 7890 2282 6 (pbk) $49.95 (hbk), $34.95 (pbk) Also issued as: The Serials Librarian, Vol. 44, Nos 1-2 and 3-4 Keywords Serials management, Serials, Electronic journals, Electronic document delivery, Databases Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547278

The term “revolution” can mean either a return to a certain point in an orbit or circular course or it can mean radical change, two seemingly contradictory definitions. However, in this case the conundrum is particularly apt. Serials are continually changing, but publication (and the budget) comes round at regular intervals. This fascinating publication of a conference of librarians, with related stakeholders, records the ferment of the war to manage resources available in a variety of forms, each with its advantages and disadvantages. The uncertainty of continued availability of archival electronic serials, as well as the difficulty of ensuring that the URL of the text can be passed on to library users, makes it impossible to commit to what at first glance seems the obvious solution of abandoning paper. Some issues seem to come around with boring monotony: the revision of AACR; changes in titles; the challenge of sharing data; handling the multiplicity of formats: one record per format or multiple locations in one record. A battle currently raging is about outsourcing electronic serials – a step much further than using agents to supply paper journals. This publication is more readable than most conference proceedings. These are not verbatim proceedings or prepared papers. Rather, each session is reported in detail by a recorder and includes not only the discussion but also comments on the presenter’s style. Congratulations to the editors for producing a cohesive, instructive and entertaining publication.

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It must have been a mammoth effort. The book will be a delight to any librarian who could not attend and wants an appreciation of the present state of serials management. We are provided with the content and flavour of the conference and an overview of the issues of the year. Even some of the humour is reported. In one case there was a discussion about the low attendance at a workshop on the important issue of censorship. Refreshingly, some presenters were criticised for poor presentation, duplication and bad timing leaving little time for discussion. Virtually all the talks concern electronic issues, but there were a few noteworthy exceptions: experience of the need for disaster planning, offsite storage arrangements, the role of the librarian, staff training, user education. Although the speakers were mainly from American colleges and universities, the issues are relevant to any library with a significant budget. Reports on, and discussion about, aggregate databases will seem familiar and reassure those librarians who feel they do not have control of these powerful resources. Reports that users, especially undergraduates, prefer electronic forms, adds to the need to face up to the choices that face us. Frustration about user statistics also rings true. But will I ever be able to say “continuing resources” rather than “serials” as instructed in the revision of Chapter 12, according to speakers from the Library of Congress (p. 246)? However, I welcome the inclusion of rules for loose-leaf materials, Web sites and databases. Discussion about cataloguing details is, however, overshadowed by the question of why catalogue in-house, and indeed, why check-in? The University of Nevado, Reno, where 20 per cent of subscriptions are to print journals, now only checks-in and binds a limited number of “highcost, high-use or graphic intensive titles” (p. 258), claiming this is based on shelf observation. This is one way to compensate for the increased staffing required to manage electronic journals, noted in a number of the presentations. Another revolutionary discussion is automatic, unmediated document supply as an alternative to journal subscriptions and interlibrary lending. After a study from January 2000 to March 2001, McGill University in Montreal, Canada has found this viable given only that orders for copies of articles from journals the library subscribes to are blocked. Not only was this cost effective, the service was quicker than interlibrary loan (15 hours as compared to an average of 16 days). There is much food for thought in this volume. An index to the presentations is included. Jane Wainwright London, UK

The Accidental Webmaster Julie M. Still Information Today, Inc. Medford, NJ 2003 209 pp. ISBN 1 57387 164 8 $29.50 Keywords Web sites, Internet Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547287

The Accidental Webmaster is a very personal account written by Still about her initial forays into designing and writing Web sites. It is aimed at individuals who have not been trained as a Web master, but have found themselves in the position of having to create and maintain a site. Still shares her experience with the reader and provides a lot of practical information on how to get started, deciding policies, selecting content, getting user feedback, fundraising and creating sites for various types of organisation. The book is divided into two parts: basic concepts, covering such items as setting policies, hosting the site, design issues, marketing and keeping up, for example; part two looks at specific types of sites, such as religious, cultural, family group, fan sites and school and children-oriented sites. Each chapter ends with a short bibliography and the book has a comprehensive index. As already stated, the book is designed for people who have little or no knowledge about creating sites and it does not provide any information on the more technical aspects of creating a Web site – there is little or no HTML code given at all. Consequently it is not in the slightest bit daunting, and it is very easy to read. It is always interesting to read of the experiences of others, particularly in areas where they are keen to encourage others, and Still cheerfully shares her own, both good and bad, experiences of Web site design. To that extent, The Accidental Webmaster achieves its aim, and the author provides a lot of food for thought for those individuals who are considering taking on the responsibility for creating and maintaining a Web site. For example, she clearly and concisely explains how and where the site can be hosted, and the various advantages and disadvantages of these options. She is also refreshingly down to earth, pointing out for example that it is likely that local or specialised sites simply won’t generate a great deal of traffic. Still leaves the reader in no doubt that the majority of sites will never be “big hitters” in the world of the Internet and makes no pretensions that they will.

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Having said that, I found the book was disappointingly frustrating. In ensuring that the book will appeal to a large readership she has deliberately limited any sort of technical discussion to an absolute minimum. For example, she explains how useful it is to track users and explains how this information can be used to improve the site. However, what she doesn’t do is provide even a brief explanation of how to collect or analyse the type of statistics that she refers to. The reader is left very much “up in the air” over this, and is given no pointers about how to even go about finding out this information. In another example, she explains that it can be very useful to know which sites link to yours, but doesn’t give readers any idea on how to actually do this, when all that would be necessary would be to add in an example of the syntax used by Google, which is hardly technical! I was also concerned about some of the statements that she makes. She talks about “buying a domain name” for example, but in actual fact no-one ever “buys” a domain name in the way in which she implies – they are only ever leased or rented, and this simply isn’t made clear. This brings up another consideration – if someone is an “accidental Web master” the clear implication is that they don’t really know what they are doing, and while Still makes some good points about legal issues, for example, I would certainly be concerned about taking what she says as “gospel”; I would want to check what she says with a number of other authoritative sources just to be certain. I was also astonished to see that, while the bibliographic references are sound, they all relate to books or hard-copy articles. There are only six references to Web sites that accidental Web masters could refer to. While this may be acceptable if you have the resources of a library available to you, the very people she has aimed the book at are much more likely to have access to the Web, and not a library. Given the sheer wealth of information freely available on the Internet, I think this has to be viewed as a grave omission. The chapters on specific types of sites were also rather disappointing in some cases: the chapter on “School and children-oriented sites” is a single page in length; the chapter on “Small business and e-commerce” was also very short, only covering “Bricks and Clicks”, “E-Commerce” and “Design Issues” in three pages. Her treatment of the subject is so brief as to be almost valueless, I’m afraid to say. In conclusion, this book is a quick read designed to point readers in the right direction. However, it can do no more than that, and anyone who wishes to take on the responsibility of creating a site is going to need to invest in other volumes, or spend a lot more time researching useful Web sites for

themselves, without any help at all from the author. It’s disappointing, because the author could have shared so much more information with the reader I’m sure, and could have written a very useful book. Unfortunately, in trying to keep things simple I think she’s made things so simple as to be almost valueless. Phil Bradley Consultant, Billericay, Essex, UK

The Practical Library Manager Bruce E. Massis Haworth International Press New York, NY 2003 149 pp. ISBN 0 7890 1765 2 $24.95 Keywords Library management, Librarians, Vocational training, Digital libraries Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547296

This book is aimed at new library managers and its focus is on helping the “fledgling manager in creating an environment of trust, teamwork, and respect” in the context of today’s changing (and sometimes turbulent) environment. It is based on current practice in the USA and includes many examples, case studies and useful lists of resources. Following an introduction, the book is divided into 11 chapters covering the following topics: challenge of staffing; impact of technology on the library manager; building core competencies for library staff; challenges and opportunities for planning and implementing a training programme for library staff; creating and implementing a technology training programme for library staff; evaluating a technology training programme for library staff; clicks and bricks; the challenge of the virtual library; the library consortium; a dynamic dozen; and management classics of the twenty-first century library manager. This is followed by two appendices covering American Library Association Accredited Library Schools, and Surveys. Finally there is an extensive bibliography. The author’s style is chatty and friendly although at times (to my ears at least) it became over-informal. The author is clearly a wellestablished library manager and director and is active in the profession. The book clearly presents his own thoughts and views, and it is very much a “how-to” book based on practical experience. This limits its value and I would have welcomed reference to wider research within the library and information community. There are less than 30 references cited in the text and these are listed in

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the notes section and indicate the US orientation of the work. My first stumbling block was in Chapter 1 where the author spends some time praising the work of one specific library school in the USA: as a European reader this was irrelevant. Chapter 2 considers the impact of technology on the library manager, and this chapter focuses on the Internet and considers issues such as access and filtering. Again, it refers predominantly to US practice. There are some major omissions in this chapter, for example the development and importance of e-learning for library managers and staff, as well as users. Chapter 4 considers practical aspects of running training programmes while Chapter 5 focuses on the development of technology training programmes. The content of these two chapters would perhaps be better presented by integrating them. Chapter 5 contains useful guidance on setting up ICT training programmes and includes some valuable checklists (e.g. evaluating technology training facilities). The next chapter on evaluating training programmes focuses on one case study and much space (almost three pages) is spent listing the “classes” that made up the programme. This chapter could have been developed by referring to standard training practice that includes evaluation at a number of different levels (reaction, learning, change in behaviour in workplace and impact on organisation). The remaining chapters outline topics such as the virtual library and then provide lists of Web sites or other resources for the reader to follow up. These will certainly help new entrants to the profession to identify major areas of practice (e.g. role of library consortia). The chapter on practical library development is concerned with gaining funding to support library developments, and the introductory text is supported by a short list of funding or sponsoring organisations in the USA. The last chapter provides an annotated bibliography of a “dynamic dozen: management classics of the twenty-first century” which includes items by authors such as Senge, Drucker, Blanchard and Peters. All library managers will have their own favourite works and I would certainly have welcomed a broader list of classics, for example to include works by Hofstede on culture and organisation, Gareth Morgan on organisational metaphors, Wenge and Lave on communities of practice, Michael Jackson (the academic rather than the singer) on systems thinking, and Lyndon Pugh’s work on the management of change in libraries. Finally, the bibliography provides a listing of printed and electronic sources on themes such as general management, career planning, core

competencies, training and development, Internet censoring and filtering, and virtual (digital) libraries. For someone new to the field this list would be enhanced by the addition of annotated notes, as I imagine that newcomers would find it difficult to select highly relevant items from these lists. Again the bias is towards US resources and the list contains relatively few items published after 2000. In summary, this is a book clearly written by an enthusiast, and many US-based library and information workers will find that it provides a helpful overview of library practice with a particular focus on staff development. It provides access to a wide range of resources. However, the book doesn’t completely live up to its promise of helping the “fledgling manager in creating an environment of trust, teamwork, and respect” as it doesn’t cover some key topics, such as recruitment and selection, managing teams or working with individuals whom we find challenging. It may encourage new managers or team leaders to read more about management thinking. Unfortunately, I think the overall focus on US practice means that this book is less likely to be of interest to library and information workers elsewhere in the world. Barbara Allan Senior Lecturer, Student Learning and Management Learning, University of Hull Business School, Hull, UK

Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval (2nd edition) G.G. Chowdhury Facet Publishing 2004 474 pp. ISBN 1 85604 480 7 London £39.95 Keywords Information retrieval, Cataloguing, Classification, Information systems Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547304

The book is aimed at students of library and information science programmes, both postgraduate and undergraduate, and at an international audience. The book covers practically all areas of information retrieval, some parts in more depth than others, such as searching, cataloguing and classification, evaluation and research issues. Material has been added and updated to most chapters, but the most significant change from the first edition is splitting the areas of cataloguing and classification into two separate chapters and providing more detail on each area.

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This could potentially be useful to computing students as well, as the detail of how information retrieval systems are implemented is described at reasonable length in the book. However, such readers would probably want to skip over some of the introductory material which may be somewhat basic for their interests. Issues such as information seeking are discussed, and important work is identified and used. The book is for the most part up-to-date with trends in information retrieval (IR). I do have some quibbles, however. There is a lack of discussion of machine learning in IR, which through models such as support vector machines (SVMs) are something of a hot topic – no references to current work in the area are given in the relevant section, for example the work of Thorsten Joachims (2001). There is a lack of appreciation of the impact of the probabilistic model of IR (e.g. there is an unsupported statement on page 175 that this model does not yield sufficiently better results than the Boolean or vector space models). The probabilistic model has become very influential recently through the BM25 weighting function, and most participants of the TREC evaluation conference use variations of the function. However, my biggest quibble is a reference to work published in 1990 which claimed that the performance of serial scanning of text was nearly comparable with searching an inverted list. Stone (1987) showed that this was not the case, and also showed that a parallel inverted file method is hard to beat in terms of reducing run times for searches. Having said all that, there are some very useful chapters for both my teaching and research. There is a lot of useful material on online searching, for systems such as Dialog, which I used on my courses. There are two chapters on users and information retrieval, which is of great use for anybody (like me) who wants to move into that area. The two chapters on natural language processing are also very interesting and useful. Important trends such as music information retrieval are also covered, and non-text retrieval issues are reasonably addressed. The writing for the most part is clear and the layout makes it easy to read. My only quibble here is that there are some typos in the book that could have been erased with some care in the editorial process. An index to the book is included at the end, and references to quoted material are given at the end of each chapter. I would recommend this book to any general reader who is interested in IR issues. It is particularly useful to students undertaking a course on IR in a library and information science department, and I use it as an

essential text on the courses I teach at City University. Andrew MacFarlane Lecturer, Department of Information Science, City University, London, UK

References Joachims, T. (2001), “A statistical learning model of text classification with support vector machines”, Proceedings of the Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 128-36. Stone, H.S. (1987), “Parallel querying of large databases: a case study”, IEEE Computer, Vol. 20 No. 10, pp. 11-21.

The Accidental Systems Librarian Rachel Singer Gordon Information Today, Inc. Medford, NJ 2003 262 pp. ISBN 1 57387 161 3 $29.50 (pbk) Keywords Library systems, Librarians Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547313

Books aimed at library professionals are becoming more and more specialised. This reflects the profession itself, and no more so than in the library computer systems field. It is no wonder that many of us became “accidental systems librarians”. This work is intended to bolster systems staff who gained their role by luck, assignment or gradual assimilation of duties. It also tries to explore how non-systems library staff can use technology more effectively, rather than merely learning the IT basics. Presented as a volume of practical advice based on extensive experience, as a whole it also takes a timely look at the relationship between traditional library and newer ICT skills so that those planning their careers can engage effectively in library innovation. Evidence for much of the content here is derived from a 2001/2002 lisjobs.com survey of 144 systems librarians: the 17 questions asked are reproduced in an appendix. Some comments from respondents illustrate the introduction, no doubt stimulating a few nods amongst experienced readers, as will the assertion that librarians have a propensity to want to solve problems. The first chapter defines terms, with the now customary acknowledgement of the difficulty in doing so. Most importantly, however, it discusses competencies and assessment, and stresses that the library context comes first and technology, as a

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tool, comes second. So, it will always be necessary to understand libraries before systems can be most effectively exploited there. New areas of technical expertise needed arise continuously. The second chapter covers a topical range, from Microsoft and Macintosh to open source software, networking and Web design. The sheer number of topics is clear from the very brief paragraphs devoted to newer ones such as e-books, virtual reference services and distance learning. The main message is that systems staff need to be librarians and adapt to institutional needs. Libraries organise knowledge. We are here exhorted to use similar skills to organise IT knowledge, for example about inventories, licensing, statistics and user support. Finding answers comes naturally, and chapters look at Internet-based research techniques as well as associations, conferences and informal networks. Providing user support also requires instruction skills, and a chapter discusses how these can be obtained or delivered through training programmes. A useful page discusses the setting of appropriate boundaries (the systems manager should not be teaching basic word-processing), so that skilled staff time is not wasted, reminding us that it is important to spread knowledge rather than hoard it. Accidental systems staff (among others) need to hone their independent learning skills, and both advice and specific, selected Web resources are presented here. One area often developed is project management, and a chapter is devoted to administration of projects such as library system migrations, software rollouts and network upgrades, as well as staff management. The book includes an unusual chapter, more commonly found in magazines or professional journals, giving useful real-world advice on topics such as finding a job, branching out, negotiating a promotion (or raise!), “technostress” and ethics. The concluding chapter suggests that boredom is never going to be an issue for accidental (or other?) library systems staff. You only have to look at the index to confirm this. Unusually, almost every letter has an entry, even in the 14 pages, although Q (Que) and Z (ZDNet) are single terms. Only Y is missing (no Yahoo!), although Google does feature under G. Ken Kozlowski (2004) has asked in a recent article in Informed Librarian: “What other era in library history offered this much diversity of work and the chance to establish oneself as the top informational dog in an organization?”. This book does not take a historical perspective to answer this, but it certainly reflects the careers of many librarians, and not just those in the US, from where most of the evidence here comes. This is a very

readable, thoughtful, pragmatic and valuable book that should be read by anyone considering library (or museum/archive) staff development or a career in libraries. Its timely relevance to the UK is indicated by the 2004 Tavistock Institute draft report (Sommerlad et al., 2003) on the People’s Network, which states: “A recurring theme in focus groups and workshops was uncertainty about the changing nature of librarian work and anxieties about the new demands being made on staff by library users in the emergent network library”. Specialisation is widely recognised as leading to faster personal development. So it is not surprising that the generation of librarians who have experienced the introduction and development of computers and the increasing sophistication and diversity of computer systems in libraries should be encouraging others to address the “unique mix of frustrations, challenges and triumphs” that systems work in libraries offers. Robin Yeates Consultant, London, UK

References Kozlowski, K. (2004), “Guest forum, January 2004: technology gets better – our job gets tougher”, available at: www.informedlibrarian.com/guestForum.cfm?FILE ¼ gf0401.html Sommerlad, E., Child, C., Ramsden, C., Barkat, S. and Kelleher, J. (2003), Evaluation of the People’s Network and ICT Training for Public Library Staff Programme – Interim Report, New Opportunities Fund, London, available at: www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/impact/results.asp

Applied Informetrics for Information Retrieval Research Dietmar Wolfram Libraries Unlimited Westport, CT 2003 216 pp. ISBN 0 313 31970 7 $60.00 (New Directions in Information Management, No. 36) Keywords Information retrieval, Research Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547322

A large number of research papers, monographs and textbooks have appeared in the past four decades covering different areas of information retrieval (IR). Similarly, research on bibliometrics and informetrics that cover all aspects of quantitative study of recorded information have also appeared in the form of books and research papers, including chapters in the Annual Review of

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Information Science and Technology. However, very few books have covered both the area of information retrieval and informetrics. Wolfram’s book fills this gap and it discusses the various applications of informetrics research on IR. The book contains eight chapters followed by a long list of references and an author-subject index. In the first chapter the author introduces the concepts of information retrieval and informetrics, and thus sets the background for the further chapters in the book. In this chapter the author also justifies the need for such a book and mentions that the main audience will comprise university students. Chapter 2 provides a brief but excellent overview of the field of IR including an explanation of the fundamental concepts of IR, various IR models, evaluation and other areas of research in IR. The origin of the term of informetrics, as well as its definition and connotation, are discussed in Chapter 3. This chapter also provides an overview of the field of informetrics including brief descriptions of the various informetric models and laws, citation and co-citation analyses, co-word analyses and obsolescence studies. Refuting the criticism that informetrics research is rather more theoretical, the author argues that there are many applications of the results of informetrics research and these are discussed in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 4 discusses the techniques for the collection of data and building models for informetric studies. This chapter specifically discusses the techniques for the collection of data for informetric studies of IR systems. Beginning with the methods of sampling and data collection, this chapter discusses the software tools and techniques used for informetric data storage and processing. A number of mathematical models have been discussed in this chapter, though readers may require substantial mathematical knowledge to understand them; however, appropriate references for further clarification and readings are provided. In Chapter 5, the author argues that from the point of view of informetric studies, an IR system can be conceived of having two sets of processes: (1) those that are associated with the documents indexed by the system; and (2) those that result from the user interactions with the IR systems. Chapter 5 discusses informetric studies in the first area, i.e. those that are concerned with the textual documents and the corresponding indexes. In particular, this chapter discusses informetric studies concerned with the distribution of index terms, indexing exhaustivity, term co-occurrences, and Webometric studies based on document citations and hyperlinks.

Chapter 6 discusses informetric studies of IR systems use and users. Specifically it discusses research on the distribution of query terms and term usage, co-occurrence of query terms and so on. Chapter 7 discusses the applications of informetric research with special reference to the IR system design and development issues. In the final chapter of the book, the author discusses the future of informetric research in the context of IR systems. Given that the modern IR systems incorporate textual as well as multimedia information, the author argues that there is a need for informetric studies of multimedia IR. The author also proposes that the results of informetric studies of IR may provide additional input for visualisation of IR systems, and thus recommends this as a new area of research. Overall the book has been written in a lucid language and the text has been supplemented with a number of figures and appropriate references. This book can definitely serve as a text for courses on informetrics, and also can act as a starting point for researchers in informetrics. Gobinda G. Chowdhury Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Informatics, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

Developing Web-based Instruction: Planning, Designing, Managing and Evaluating for Results Edited by Elizabeth A. Dupuis Facet Publishing London 2003 312 pp. ISBN 1 85604 494 7 £44.95 Keywords Computer based learning, Teaching, Internet, Worldwide web Review DOI 10.1108/00330330410547331

Initially I found the title of this book slightly misleading, given that it contained no reference to libraries. However, the major clue is that it is published by Facet, and in fact the back of the book describes it as “essential reading for all those involved in delivering online learning in libraries, whether in a technical, design, educational or support role”. It claims to “guide you through all the stages needed to create successful Web-based instruction in your library”. As a librarian about to embark on a Web-based information literacy course, it couldn’t have landed on my desk at a better time, and I was able to put it to the test! The book has three sections, each with an overview and contributions from four or five

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authors: examining, planning and management; evaluation and assessment; and design and development. Originally published in the United States, the bias is evident from the outset, with terminology such as “learning management software” for “virtual learning environment”, and “educational technology” in place of “learning technology”. The references concentrate entirely on US-based examples, despite the considerable body of work in the UK to develop online tutorials, for example the Resource Discovery Network Virtual Training Suite (www.vts.rdn.ac.uk) and the Information Skills Project (http://inhale.hud. ac.uk/cgi-bin/informs.pl). This US focus makes the value of the book to the UK market less obvious. Similarly, the e-learning and pedagogy chapters are overwhelmingly US-biased, with just one chapter referring to Laurillard’s (2001) conversational framework. The content of the book is comprehensive, with useful advice and practical examples that librarians elsewhere can learn from. The book’s structure is, though, interesting and shaped largely by the editor’s belief that evaluation and assessment methods should be considered early in any research project. To emphasise this point, the chapters on this topic are placed before the design and development section. While I understand the rationale for doing this, it does mean the final two chapters on site design and putting content online seem to appear somewhat late in the book. These two chapters give by far the largest amount of practical and useful advice and are illustrated with numerous screen shots. However, this information may be for many readers the real core of the book. Somewhat unusually, the book does not end with

any form of conclusion but provides appendices containing advice about writing project proposals and further reading. The chapters do vary in terms of the number of practical examples they contain and the amount of references. I particularly liked Chapter Two on “Teams and Partners”, which included lots of valuable advice for all types of team work situations. Chapter Six on “Statistics and Metrics” stood out as being both useful and well written, providing a balanced overview of how statistics, such as server logs, should and should not be used. Chapter Seven on focus groups is also helpful for anyone new to this research method, although I feel their value is often overstated and I would have liked to see other qualitative methods such as interviews discussed as well. Overall, the book has pulled together a lot of valuable experience which others can learn from. It is a shame that some references to projects in the UK and Australia were not incorporated. But as librarians are increasingly expected to venture into the realm of Web-based instruction, this book is well worth dipping into for guidance. Jane Secker Assistant Librarian (Learning Technology), London School of Economics, London, UK

Reference Laurillard, D. (2001), Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology, Routledge, London.

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