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Imagine www.research.library.org
Brinley Franklin
Imagine, on the eve of the new millennium, that a group of research library directors meet to discuss a collaborative start-up venture: www.researchlibrary.org.
Using the power of the Internet, member libraries anywhere in the world might offer to their students and faculty a complete array of electronic services, access to tens of millions of printed books and journals, and twenty-four-hour-a-day reference service. Moreover, these services might be offered at lower cost by eliminating or reducing redundancies, by planning for cooperative collection development, and by exploiting collective buying power.
Sound far-fetched? This scenario actually played out at a recent Association of Research Libraries (ARL)/Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Strategic Issues Forum. Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Harvard Law School Center for Internet and Society, challenged the library directors in attendance to develop founding principles, a business plan, a homepage, and a set of performance measures for an Internet-based research library collaboration.
What could this mean for the University of Connecticut? I can imagine a 21st century UConn library that, on the surface, would not appear to be significantly different from the UConn library of 1999. The library would continue to offer strong print collections, technically skilled staff offering specialized services, quality study and research space, and a wealth of electronic resources. But, as a member of www.researchlibrary.org, the library would offer a great deal more in terms of access and service.
It is feasible that www.researchlibrary.org could subscribe to virtually every print and electronic journal available. Archives could be located regionally, as the National Library of Medicine now designates regional medical libraries. Sharing a virtual catalog that combined holdings from all members' online catalogs, www.researchlibrary.org could offer access to combined resources approaching the 40 million records currently available in OCLC's WorldCat. (As a point of reference, UConn's online catalog contains about 1.5 million records.)
Users of www.researchlibrary.org could request items they identified online directly from the library that owns them. Printed materials could be shipped directly to the user by the lending library; electronic documents could be transmitted to their email address. Taking advantage of time zones around the world, reference service from expert librarians could be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A UConn student studying at 2 AM in Storrs, could pose a question to an Australian librarian via www.researchlibrary.org during that librarian's normal working hours.
Smaller variations on this model already exist: the Triangle Research Libraries Network (North Carolina, Duke, and North Carolina State), the Boston Library Consortium (sixteen academic and research libraries in Massachusetts and Rhode Island), and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Center for Library Initiatives (Big Ten plus University of Chicago).
Academic librarians are not alone in considering the potential benefits (and losses) of global collaboration. Steve Coffman, director of FYI at the LA County Public Library, has proposed the "Earth's Largest Library" to offer patrons access to collections at all participating libraries as amazon.com does for commercial book sales. Just as the presence of amazon.com has helped to enhance the value of the local bookstore for many readers, www.researchlibrary.org would need the presence of physical libraries to succeed. One objection to a totally electronic library has been sounded by Walt Crawford, author of Being Analog: Creating Tomorrow's Libraries and co-author of Future Libraries. He has described Coffman's proposed electronic library as the "Library from 'ELL."
Subsequent to the ARL/OCLC Strategic Issues Forum, a working
group drafted a set of three basic principles for joint
future-oriented action based on traditional academic library
values:
- Scholarly and government information is a "public good" and must be available free of marketing bias, commercial motives, and cost to the individual user.
- Libraries are responsible for creating innovative information systems for the dissemination and preservation of information and new knowledge regardless of format.
- The academic library is the intellectual commons for the community where people and ideas interact in both the real and virtual environments to expand learning and facilitate the creation of new knowledge.
The 21st century research library will be different. But the core values of librarians, worldwide and here at the University of Connecticut, remain largely unchanged. Our challenge is to combine the power of technology with a strong local presence and service tradition. With careful planning, we hope to offer the UConn community ever better access to collections and services through global collaboration with other research libraries.
Brinley Franklin is director of library services; contact him at brinley.franklin@uconn.edu or 860-486-0497.
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