[LA Home Page] Media focus on the Internet over the past three years has exposed the general public to the concept of using computer networks to communicate and retrieve information. However, it is mainly during the last year that the growing number of cybercafes combi ned with Internet access through the public library service [Ref.1] as increased the possibility for the general public to access the Net. While the majority of special libraries now also have Internet connections, it is the academic library sector which has the most experience of accessing and providing networked information. This article examines some of the current applications of Internet technology and networked information in academic libraries. It is hoped that, by highlighting these applications, this article may encourage the creative use of the Internet in other sectors of the library and information world.
The usual concept of the Internet is as an information resource, bringing a wide range of material from around the world to a local machine. This view of the Net tends to assume this information is free and therefore is probably limited in scope. It is more accurate to view the Internet as a low cost means of communication and in this capacity it is heavily used by academic libraries to reach a variety of priced services. Most now use the Net to connect to the long established commercial online serv ices, though traffic congestion sometimes means there is a compromise by using the JANET TACS service to connect to a BT service.
More interesting has been the growth of subsidised database services for the UK academic community funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) notably those under the BIDS (Bath Information and Data Services) banner. These comprise services like the various ISI citation indexes, Compendex, Embase, the British Library's Inside Information and a number of databases from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Thus for a relatively modest annual subscription an institution can have unlimited access to a database from as many terminals or PCs as the system can support. For example, the ISI databases alone have up to 150,000 sessions per month (representing up to 35,000 hours of connect time) with up to 2 million references printed or e-mailed. By contrast 10 years ago UK academic librarians were carrying out probably no more than 2,000 online searches per month on all databases [estimated from figures in Ref 2] and CD-ROMs were not yet in use. End user access has thus arrived at most UK universities in a very satisfactory way.
Another approach has been that of SilverPlatter in developing its ERL technology into the ARC service which offers many of its CD-ROMs across the national JANET academic network, allowing universities to network them more easily than by running their own system. Once connected the interface is the same as if the CD was being run locally.
The availability of library catalogues across the Internet was one of the earlier uses (early in Internet terms means the 1980s or BW, Before the Web) and is seen, at least by librarians, as an important application. Access to the copyright deposit libraries; the developing union catalogues like COPAC , which lists the stock of major UK and Irish university libraries, and SALSER, which lists serials from a variety of types of Scottish library; many specialist libraries; and overseas national libraries bring many bibliographic benefits.
Another area of growing importance for academic libraries is that of electronic journals. Printed research journals continue their inexorable price rises way beyond any comparable increase in most library budgets; mutilation and theft of issues is a continuing problem and provision to distributed campuses can be difficult. Electronic alternatives may offer solutions. In addition to new journals published only on the Internet many publishers are offering electronic versions of their established titles. In the main these cost the same as the printed journal or perhaps 10-20 per cent more for both, so the problem of rising costs may continue to be an issue for some time.
However at present there are Funding Council projects involving Academic Press, the Institute of Physics and, soon, Blackwells making many titles available at no additional cost to test the concept.
In addition to these specialist services academic librarians also make use of the Internet information that is available to all users. Much bibliographical and price information can be found from online bookstores and Web sites for professional organisations and publishers. A wide range of factual information from US government and EU sources is available too, though rather less from the UK government. Although librarians have more scepticism about the well-publicised Web search tools than most users, such services can be valuable, particularly for easily defined topics (such as names or abbreviations) and the sheer range of material indexed, subjects covered and the speed with which they search can make them useful when a clear starting point is not obvious. They may not always retrieve a full answer, but may give helpful clues. Similarly a speculative query to a discussion list or newsgroup may identify an "expert" to answer a problem.
The Internet is largely a publishing medium and academic librarians have not been slow to use it in that way, particularly in relation to the CWIS (Campus Wide Information Service) set up in the last few years in many universities. These services were used initially to provide local information - addresses, phone numbers, regulations etc - and various proprietary or specially written software was used until the arrival of gopher software in 1991. Its simplicity in use, and more importantly, the ability to link easily to Internet resources led to a general adoption that has now inevitably been replaced by use of the World Wide Web. University Web sites now have many purposes - such as:
Librarians may be involved with designing the structure of the site, and are likely to have responsibility for some of the general content. They certainly will be providing pages about library services. These may often be the equivalent to the printed guides to stock and services that have been produced for many years, such as at Swansea but can be more readily updated and maybe extended, for example, to give a hypertext tour of the building as at Dundee University or UMIST .
There may be guides to Internet resources in general, as at Luton or in a subject, as at Glamorgan, maybe complementing the national guides like the BUBL Subject Tree and eLib gateways such as EEVL , OMNI and SOSIG to which many academic librarians contribute.
Even better is a guide to a subject that incorporates printed, CD-ROM and Internet resources, such as at York since academic librarians are keen to ensure users see the Internet as a part of the whole range of information resources available to them.
In accepting Internet resources as just another information medium, academic librarians are extending their skills to encompass it. So they may offer a current awareness service to teaching and research staff to inform them of new Web sites and discussion lists; they will apply established criteria to assessing the content of information sources or the effectiveness of secondary services like search tools (for example Celia Hukins' Information World Review article); and will compile 'live' bibliographies (i.e. with hot links), such as Roy Davies' pages explaining how to find people's email addresses.
The hypertext nature of the Web makes it easy to make additional explanation or instruction for a resource as an optional choice. This concept of instruction at the point and time of use is harder to achieve in the physical library.
As noted above library catalogues have been accessible on the Internet for many years but they are likely to become a one stop access to local and Internet resources from a single terminal. Web versions of catalogues have come into use recently - particularly with BLCMP's wonderfully named TalisWeb OPAC - and it is easy to link from a catalogue record, such as for an electronic journal, direct to the resource. Applications are still at the experimental stage, as for example at Loughborough University, but the potential is there.
Widespread access to the Internet has also created new means of communicating with users. In some cases, Internet technologies (e.g. email and publishing on Web pages) are used to reproduce an existing service in another medium, such as online "suggestion boxes". However, there is "added value" to such a service as users can mail in their suggestions from terminals on or off campus at a time convenient to them.
Email enquiry or reference services also represent an extension of mainstream library activity - although some academic librarians initially had concerns about being able to meet the demand of such a service. Reference and enquiry services in academic libraries in the main seek to teach their users how to search for information themselves, rather than answering the enquiries themselves, as is more likely to be the case in a special library.
A significant number of British academic libraries have adopted electronic mail enquiry or information services - at the University of Hull the "email help line" is treated as an extension of the Enquiry Desk service. These services have usually started off in a low-key way, with minimal publicity, to ensure that the resulting demand is not more than staffing levels can cope with. Anecdotal evidence suggests that electronic enquiry services are not overwhelmed, and most users do stay within the parameters of the service. The most successful email enquiry services have developed their procedures and boundaries prior to the service going live. As many enquiries fall into the category of Frequently Asked Questions, these can thus be answered by existing position statements.
For example, Newcastle University Library has recently set up NERD - the Newcastle Electronic Reference Desk (accessible from their Library pages). NERD is a database of questions and answers about University Library services and stock. Members of Newcastle University can search to see if a question has already been asked and answered; if they don't find a satisfactory answer, they can send their question to an expert on the Library staff.
It is too early to predict whether establishing a "virtual reference desk" will become a common trend in UK academic libraries. Perhaps some library will set up a GEEK (General Enquiries, Education and Knowledge) service.
Electronic mail also has great potential to cut down on the mountain of paperwork involved in sending out recall notices, notifying readers that items can be collected etc. However, there are a number of practical obstacles which have prevented this becoming a widespread practice so far, particularly relating to the provision of access to networked workstations on which users can check their mail messages. For example, few libraries would wish to disadvantage part-time students, as they are likely to have less access to email than other students. Some library systems, such as Talis, allow students to renew loans (provided no other reader is waiting for the book) directly via the OPAC or to request a renewal via email.
Cutbacks in funding have led many academic institutions to favour an access rather than holdings approach to stock, and thus Inter-Library Loan services have developed a higher profile. The increasing range of providers of document delivery across the Internet (which includes BODOS, UnCover, and Ask IEEE) may be used by library staff and end-users alike. An immediate application of Internet technology in the ILL area is the use of WWW templates for Inter-Library Loan request forms, although the Library will still need to develop procedures to obtain a signature for copyright purposes. One method is to allow users to print off the form, sign it and "snail mail" it to the Library - by the time it reaches the Library the request to BLDSC will have been transmitted electronically a day or so earlier. An early pioneer in this area was the University of Leeds which provided an electronic ILL request "template" on a mainframe in the mid-1980s.
Other WWW templates can be developed for book request forms and user surveys. Feedback on new services (including the Library's own WWW pages) can often be elicited more easily from a Web page than might be the case with a traditional paper-based survey.
The activities discussed above illustrate some of the new roles which academic librarians have taken on in the past five years. Some would argue that these are not new roles at all - that they are in fact extensions of the traditional role of the librarian in collecting, organising, and disseminating information.
The eLib-funded NetLinkS project aims to help librarians mediate the emerging electronic library to the academic community. Aspects which it addresses include using the networks to deliver effective end-user training and support, using computer-mediated communication and/or electronic document delivery.
In the early 1990s it was often librarians who gave demonstration sessions of resources on the Internet which could be used to support teaching and learning, while their colleagues in computing services gave training in the use of networked information discovery and retrieval tools. With the advent of the World Wide Web, this division between Internet resources and the tools to access them has become blurred.
Academic librarians may well draw on training materials developed by the Netskills project for the higher education community.
Recently the issue of whether librarians should learn HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) was debated on a North American discussion list. The conclusion was that a knowledge of basic HTML was necessary in order to prepare presentations and information guides, which are an integral part of the librarian's professional role. As an increasing number of academic libraries experience some measure of "convergence" with other academic support services, library staff have many opportunities to augment their IT skills and collaborate with colleagues in other services. The combination of technical knowledge and the ability to evaluate information sources is a powerful argument for the continued need for LIS professionals in higher education.
Access to the Internet has greatly enhanced opportunities for professional development and current awareness. These include: "lurking" and contributing to electronic discussion lists; email delivery of tables of contents (TOCs) of library journals (for example, see lis-bubl-e2: a list which acts as a global dissemination avenue for LIS- oriented material added to BUBL); and access to papers,or at least their abstracts, from LIS conferences which are published on the WWW.
As a result of their activity, some academic librarians have achieved fame (or notoriety) outside their local sphere of influence. The work of Dennis Nicholson from Strathclyde University on BUBL, and the Internet Resources Newsletter edited by Roddy MacLeod and Gordon Andrew at Heriot-Watt University are obvious examples which spring to mind. There are many opportunities for individuals to contribute nationally through involvement with an Internet-related project, such as the eLib-funded subject gateways mentioned above. Thus, while textbook provision for students may still remain the most important function of most university libraries, librarians are ensuring that the Internet and its resources are now an integral part of the services that are available to the academic community.
Alison McNab is Academic Services Manager, Pilkington Library, Loughborough University. Ian Winship is Faculty Librarian, Information Services Department, University of Northumbria at Newcastle. They are the authors of The student's guide to the Internet, which draws on their experience of training end-users and promoting Internet resources in their respective institutions. It is aimed at all students and is published by LAP. ISBN: 1 85604 207 3. £6.99 (£5.60 LA members). Available from Bookpoint (01235 400400).
© Alison McNab & Ian Winship
Last updated: 29 Nov 96