possibilities for remote storage
By J.P. McCarthy.
(Paper to be presented at the IUISC Conference, Killarney 2001)
The aim:
The aim of this paper is to consider some possible directions for the future development of our remote storage facility at UCC and the impact of digital knowledge products on such a future. It is an exercise in crystal ball gazing.
The present profile:
We are predominantly a print purchasing library acquiring stock at the rate of over 35,000 books alone per annum quite apart from journal issues and other media and growing in physical terms at the rate of what must be over 3,000 ft per annum. We occupy a building designed in the early 1970s to hold approximately 600,000 volumes. Our actual print holdings go well beyond this figure. For example we have a remote storage facility located within a 3 mile radius of the campus which currently contains over 300,000 volumes and which has a projected growth rate of 20,000 items per annum consisting of monographs and journals relegated from the main library and some donation/presentations taken in directly to the Store. In the Boole Library building the print stock profile is predominantly one of books and journals acquired to form a teaching and research resource for the faculties. There are also some groupings of stock which were either acquired because of special attributes or extracted from the main run of stock for similar reasons. This material is described as Special Collections. Each collection has a theme threading it together, giving it an integrity of its own. Themes can be subject specific, person related, heritage related. In terms of age, our holdings - our knowledge pile of printed stock, ranges from the most recently acquired 2001 imprints back to our incunabula, with each century in between represented.
As a map of printed knowledge the spread of subject headings within
our catalogue shows a widely spread tapestry, thin in places, heavily embroidered in others. This is a map of knowledge set in fixed in structures both within texts
and by the classification scaffolding we have imposed on it. The map charts an intellectual landscape and its architecture as sketched by a 500 year old print technology. New technology offers the opportunity to change the paradigm. Will any of the old landscape survive? Will print libraries as we know them survive or will they become remotely housed, closed access museological entities - the preserve of heritage custodians? Perhaps we should begin exploring such questions by speculating on a vision of the future.
A vision of a future library:
What form might such a vision take? A multimedia subset of the total corpus of knowledge in existence to which we have local access constrained by what we can afford perhaps? Such access to exist only as an entity on the College website through which some remote and some locally stored knowledge artifacts would be accessible along with value added elements to guide, advise, organize, and aid interpretation. Would it be totally a library without walls, without any physical existence in common parlance, perhaps without any human organization to run it?
The assumptions:
There are some assumptions in such a scenario. Firstly that all print technology will become redundant in favour of digital alternatives and that all of the intellectual product which we currently hold and that which we would like to hold, would be available in digital form either to acquire or to access. Secondly that we would choose to abandon the knowledge stored unwittingly in our print collections i.e. the craft of the book, the typographic knowledge, the casing knowledge, the cultural elements reflected
in the manner in which text is structured and stored. That the veils of the ‘invisible web’ have been penetrated by the spiders of powerful search engines
Writing on the subject Translating Data to Knowledge in Digital Libraries
(www.csd1.tamu.edu/DL94/position/springer.html) Gordon Springer and
Timothy Patrick of the University of Missouri-Columbia make several pertinent observations about the classical or traditional library in this regard:
“One of
its shortcomings is that it is designed to store and retrieve
documents not information or knowledge.”
“That this limits the ability of users to
extract information or knowledge in
an intelligent way.”
“That
in a digital library environment it would be a serious injustice
to continue to only extract documents.”
In summary they
say “The digital library brings with
it the need to
break with the traditions of the classical
library. We need to seek out better
ways to increase the dimensionality of the
information space to provide a
wider variety of pathways to the information
contained within the space.”
The space they are referring to is that three dimensional space represented by
knowledge/ information stored on a library’s shelves and in their view
accessible only through the pathways provided by a classification scheme
and by traditional text structures. So in breaking away from traditional
designs in knowledge storage and access, we may in time separate from not
only the traditional physical storage elements of knowledge but also
from traditional concepts of knowledge access and use thereby evolving
new models in our understanding of the purposes of knowledge and of
learning. In such a context perhaps is it only in our library stores that traditional
concepts of knowledge will survive? How might future scholars coming
from a digital tradition view the now commonplace methods of accessing it?
Between the vision and the present is
a story yet to be told:
Were we asked in the near future to adapt to a campus wide strategy to abandon print based technology totally in favour of digital alternatives how would we
go about responding and to what extent would we succeed and over what period of
time would we phase the transition from one scenario to another? There are many
predictions and forecasts in the literature and it is easy to quote ‘ad nauseam’.
Perhaps however the more creative way to explore such issues is to express them
as questions in an attempt to go some way towards visualizing where the bridging concepts between the two may lie. So what are the questions?
How would we go about responding? Perhaps initially only in a very Irish fashion by asking question
about questions. Here are a few :
· What Budgteary issues will there be?. Initially budget allocations may target the acquisition of new knowledge products either as alternative access resources or as replacements for print resources.
There is not much in this to rock the boat.
The impact overtime however, perhaps as the acquisition
of print knowledge decreases, will possibly affect all aspects of the
structure of a budgetary plan. One wonders about the forces which would influence such budgeting, how the elements of the plan would change and how its strategies would become reconfigured? Indeed one wonders about the extent to which such plans would drive
us towards a digital future and dictate what it will be?
·
What of stock acquisition?
What constraints will there be on purchasing and selecting?
As with journals will we be forced to buy what we want bundled in with what we do not need. It is interesting to watched the impact of a similar issue within the music industry.
Will we be able to afford what we want?
What opportunities will exist to expand significantly the scope of knowledge already available from our holdings.
How much buying of digital texts will be retrospective replacement?
How much current, new knowledge? Will the configurations in
which we currently acquire knowledge remain with us for the
future? How will the design of knowledge products as we know
them develop in time? How will multiple access alternatives, text
customization, the once-off assemblage of texts on demand, a loss
of permanence, a loss of authentication, affect our selecting and
purchasing decisions? How will commercial electronic reference
services, online reference experts and personalized credit card pay-
per-access options affect the picture.
·
What of preservation?
How much investment in the digitization of special and/or locally focused print and manuscript resources? Should we become more involved in the capturing of locally produced knowledge and in it dissemination in digital form?
·
What of building use and
furnishings?
In a scenario where shelving for bookstock is being dismantled
and much free floorspace is becoming available for other uses
what strategies for space use will present themselves? More
reader places? But to read what – laptop screens? More PCs
-but to access what? What is already available through a wireless laptop anywhere you may wish to be? Some of the thinking
one encounters in the literature at present seems to assume that
a digital center will provide an alternative use for the Library
building giving a “bookless” library or a hybrid creature heading in
that direction. In such a scenario what happens to the bookstock?
Does it get sent to the shredder?
Or is it sent to remote storage for a slower demise or perhaps
selection for long term preservation in high density warehouse
storage according to some set of criteria?
·
What of staff?
In such a scenario what happens to all of those staff who operate
processes and procedures which are derived from the handling of
printed stock. How would a digital library absorb them? What
roles could they play in the drama of a digital library?
If any of these questions points to something close to a future reality, what kind of role is there for our stores? For UCC, like many academic libraries worldwide on the threshold of a digital future, remote storage is an accepted and unavoidable reality for the near future. When we first began to have a remote store for the Boole library circa 1984, the perception was that of a place for old, little used stock – an attic, garden shed, garage mentality.
Why keep this material? Well you never know! Keep it just in case! As the size of our stock grew and space at the Boole became an issue the nature of relegated material changed and as a result the nature of the store’s role also changed to being a very active part of library services with a significant requisitions service. As our purchasing policy for fulltext digital products begins to evolve and as more and more journal titles for example become available online, there is an increasing temptation to relegate print versions of these online titles to store.
In the grey pool of uncertainty which exists concerning the eventual abandonment of print subscriptions, remote storage seems to offer at least a temporary respite. It affords the library and its clientele a low risk opportunity to test the new paradigm. It releases them from the constraints of a traditional vision allowing for
practical experiments in the modeling of new electronic services, of what a digital
future might be like without making a full commitment.
How would we phase the transition?
Perhaps by recognizing that we are dealing with a printed product to which our libraries give a life cycle, moving it from the day its acquired to some distant day when it may disintegrate with age on the shelf of some remote store. Analysing and quantifying the costs involved in that life cycle may provide the best means of arguing for change to a digital knowledge environment. Do you begin with a major drive to invest in fulltext databases which eliminate the need for the backruns of journals in the store?
In such an environment it is perhaps at the stores that the final decisions on the survival of knowledge in print form will be made. It is perhaps there that the final balancing between investment in the preservation of print technology vs the preservation of knowledge will be made.
To what extent would we succeed?
How much of a dream landscape is this future scenario I have given above. How many of the scholarly opinions and ideas in the literature ever really
come close to the realities which emerge over time. The gap is perhaps as wide as that between the possible and the probable, between what is actually locally achievable and
what might be achieved if only…So how realistic is this digital future? It is probably as realistic, partially as we wish it to be and as we may invest in making it so, partially
as much as external forces impose it upon us by reducing our choice options, by
demanding newly established technological standards common in society in general,
by making it the most responsible budgetary choice.
But what of digitizing the stores
themselves?
So far I have dealt with libraries and I have referred to remote storage as though it were something which represented the end process in the life cycle of printed knowledge products. As though it would most likely become a repository rather than a depository. The difference is significant. It has been our tradition to keep everything and in that context we have always had a degree of ambiguity about which word was most appropriate to describe our storage facility as it grew from something very small in the early 1980s to what it is today. But as we now begin to recognize that significant annual growth at the store will be an important and costly investment for the near future at least, the possibility of alternative methods of storage, of getting maximum value for the investment is becoming an issue. Which raises the question what are the alternatives?
· In a worst case scenario we do nothing and allow the stock to grow
rapidly absorbing floor space with fixed shelving units until once again
the building is too small and we either move to another building on
lease or alternatively we acquire the funding for a custom-built
structure.
· Or perhaps we should set about a strategy to gradually introduce mobile shelving until we have absorbed all of the available floor space using this method and thereby increasing the capacity and lengthening the term of occupancy of the building. However in the long term we would still come to a stage where floor space is still an issue and this
would again force us to look at moving to either another leased building or towards a custom-built structure.
· American College libraries faced with similar problem have devised
an alternative and this is known as high density storage. The idea here is that you store the stock by size. Stock is then housed on trays in large custom-built warehouses on racking 30 feet in height which is accessed by forklift like vehicles known as cherrypickers. You can see photographs and descriptions of some
examples on the website
http://www.lib.duke.edu/lsc/othersites.htm
and in particular note the installation at Virginia Tech. These simple form structures are suited to modular development as long as sufficient
space is available for expansion in the immediate vicinity of the building.
Underlying current circumstances there is an assumption that we must continue to keep all we acquire in print, that we do not make policy decisions to weed, to discard, to sell or donate. That we have not decided on a mission, on a future need for this stock. How significant an impact would such a mission statement have on the long term growth of stock at the Store? For us not a major one in the long term. We have looked at
our periodicals run (12,500ft) there and yes, some of it is composed of broken or short runs of titles which could as easily be acquired through InterLibrary Loans. We do carry duplicate monographs which could be sold. We carry reference works which are out of date and of little interest except perhaps to the historian. We carry many unsorted donations and presentations some of may not bring any real knowledge value to our holdings. We also carry within the covers of these monographs and journals many texts which have never been consulted.
An interesting question to pose in an environment like our store is what percentage of our investment in compiling this knowledge stock over a 150 year period has ever been used or will ever be. Also because of under-resourcing in our non-current cataloguing activity a very large percentage perhaps as much as two thirds of the Store’s stock is not registered on the online catalogue and as such is not identifiable as part of the collection. So in that case is there much sense in holding onto most of this stock? How expensive is it to store per annum? How much would it cost to catalogue it all. I don’t have figures but the cost would be significant.
So what is my point? It is that a lot of what we currently store may be of little or no value to our scholarly community for the future. Therefore why invest in long term storage? What is the alternative? How would the costs of long term storage and of cataloguing match up with a digital access alternative to those parts of the holdings identifiable as key research resources? How much should we invest in providing for serendipitous discovery? How much should we invest in preserving collections we
regard as special? Such questions require an enlightened collections development policy!
Keeping Special Print Collections:
When we venture from discussions on the future of main library collections to considering Special Collections we shift from a discussion about the transmission of knowledge content to one concerned with the preservation of the context of that content.
Were a national depository for this part of our national heritage in existence would one also see Special Collections stored there? Perhaps not. Special collections in many ways like museum collections represent far more than the content of the texts of which they are composed. As assemblages these collections possess an integrity which is in itself a cultural/heritage entity. They can represent a local sense of prestige. Of scholarly enrichment, of uniqueness so very important to the identities of individual academic institutions. Therefore local preservation of Special Collections is a very different issue from that of the more general collections of which the Library and its store is composed. As such even a digital alternative to such a collection is not a realistic one in so far as the independent existence of the texts in digitized version bears no relationship to the messages contained within the collecting process. One wonders what definitions of ‘special digital collections’ will emerge in times to come. But to continue
with the subject of main collections….
Main Collections - The Digital
option:
The first question one is tempted
to ask is whether or not there is one
as yet, at least of significant proportions to make this alternative a viable
option. It is true that services like JSTOR, Project Muse, ECO etc are making
significant in-roads in offering electronic access to the corpus of established
journal titles. Indeed prediction by Okerson
published in the journal Library Trends recently claim that “between
2000 and 2005 all
significant STM journals will be on the WEB, indexing and abstracting will serve as gateways to journal content, electronic books will sweep onto the WWW, archiving solutions will emerge and consortia will grow in power .”( Library Trends vol.48, no. 4, pp671-693 & summarized p.641)
So were we to try to compare, regardless of cost issues, digital with
print alternatives, what degree of coverage is now available and at what pace
is it developing and what is its scope? When should we expect to see a
significant amount of what we have in print storage available in e-form? Many
forecasts and predictions can be found in that the issue of Library Trends
quoted above entitled Collection Development in an
Electronic Environment.
Cutting the tether:
If we reach a stage where abandoning our store holdings, already weeded, is a realistic option, will we take it and at what risk? What will we loose in abandoning our paper landscape of knowledge. Will all the map’s routeways, all their twists and turns vanish? Will all that is known be digitally knowable with little or nothing in the way of
discovery and exploration? With no arduous routes to scholarly pinnacles …all bulldozed
away by the power of search engines?
National Issue:
But then again, even if UCC were to abandon its print holdings at some
future point in time does this imply that such products would be destroyed,
that nationally all stores and printed products would be abandoned?
I do not have information regarding other NUI Colleges but I wonder about the extent to which they have similar concerns about the long term storage of print stock and about digital alternatives. Is there a case for saying that in the Colleges of the NUI one could find many copies of the same monographs and serials, many of which are hardly ever consulted if at all. If this is the case what is the logic in long term preservation for all
of these. Would it be more cost effective for all involved to have a national depository strategy, a national bibliographic depository which would take responsibility for the long term preservation of our printed knowledge resources and which would take responsibility for ensuring that access is always available to the knowledge stored in
this archive? Who would take responsibility for such a depository? A consortium perhaps, one also charged with consortium deals for electronic products perhaps? One which would concern itself with archiving issues for e-products and with long term strategies for the migration of digitally stored knowledge to new or alternative storage products? Should such a depository become the advisory center for a national strategy on the transition from a print to a digital scholarly culture. Is it realistic to ask individual colleges to find independent answers to such questions?
In the creation of such a depository one of the biggest questions would perhaps related to the reaction of scholars to seeing stock which has been locally based and within the immediate control of their own institutions moved elsewhere. What arguments could the academic library community make? E-forms of some products are available campus wide and indeed from where ever you may wish to access them.
Others can be faxed to you, borrowed through InterLibrary loans.
You can use the library building as a center for these forms of document delivery. Temporary deliveries and storage of stock can be made to the library to facilitate browsing. This suggests that the circulation of printed stock could still be a major drain on resources. Perhaps the word library is no longer used in favour of the term Learning
Resource Centre? A clearing house for knowledge/information interchange, for brokerage and content marketing? Would a residual social memory for the word library relate only
to the store?
In a proposal document submitted in May 1998 to the Andew W. Mellon Foundation by the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The John Hopkins University, USA
and available on the WEB ( http://dkc.mse.jhu.edu/CAPM/proposal.html) a method for “providing real-time browsability of library collections stored at off-campus storage facilites is described. Known as CAPM (Comprehensive Access to Offsite Library Materials), the project will result in a national model for library service and access to resources, providing patrons with new electronic capabilities to access, browse and electronically capture information through a cost-saving process that will enhance libray service while helping universities control the rising cost of higher education. CAPM addresses Library patrons’ primary criticism of book storage facilities i.e. being separated from library materials”. The proposal involves The John Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering working with IBM, Ameritech and Minolta to develop the system. It is proposed that the system using robotics, automated systems and high speed telecommunications would perform as follows:
“A patron would use the Library’s
web-based catalogue to identify an
off-site stored item. CAPM would
transmit a request to retrieve and bring it to a scanning station. Scanning
would be done by robotic systems. The pages are scanned, converted to OCR
software and indexed. Digital images of the pages are sent across the NET to
the patron’s browser. Patrons can then request delivery of the physical item or
its return to
the store’s shelves”.
One wonders about what subsequent
opportunities these scanned documents might offer. An interesting statement
made in support of developing this technology and thereby enhancing the future
role and importance of storage facilities is
“The cost of building and operating the no-frills warehouse is as
little as one fifteenth that of a traditional library even considering the
expense of delivering materials to campus”.
So why choose to meet the challenge
of a digital future?
Quoting
the inaugural address of the President of John Hopkins University Dr. William
Brady the CAPM proposal gives one university’s reasoning on why it should
invest in alternatives to print libraries. “In the past libraries have
assembled collections of scholarly material – journals, books and manuscripts –
and made them available on a ’just in case’ basis. Materials filling our
library at Hopkins are duplicated in thousands of other libraries, just in case
a student or faculty member needs immediate access to the material. Today, few
libraries can afford to maintain such collections. So librarians on the cusp of
change are looking at ‘just-in-time’ libraries. These are facilities that will
provide access to materials when you need them using electronic access or
express delivery. They will not necessarily be required to maintain that
information in their own physical collection. Such virtual libraries are
technically possible to introduce today…One of my goals is to see this
university take up the challenge of redesigning and implementing the library of
the future. Financial pressures alone may make this effort a matter of
necessity in the near future. This is
just one aspect of the physical changes brought about by the information
revolution”.
Seen in this way, the option of remote storage is significant. But what happens then? When say these new concepts of ‘library’ service become established? If the digital becomes the norm? What happens to the stores long term? Will they be seen as having any relevance in the role of such future libraries? If not then what will be their value, their purpose in continuing to exist? Perhaps that depends on how passive stores are in shaping such change. Seen as facilitators and perhaps as an instrument for shaping
a digital future, remote storage with its developing philosophies and technologies, may as yet offer the safest guide-rails as we cross into an uncertain future. Indeed perhaps it is only at the end of such a crossing that we may finally rationalize their value.
Conclusion:
We cannot as yet envisage a digital library future in terms of all its implications for the traditional custodianship of printed knowledge. Will it happen? Yes it probably will overtake us whether we wish it to or not regardless of how we plan for it. What will be left with as the dust settles? Forgotten collections of decaying print stock in remote intellectual wastelands? What migrations will the cultural memory now stored in print
take in the centuries to come as newer and
newer forms of storage material come into existence? Is there is danger of
loosing the intellectual wealth of western civilization as we know it because
of this? Is the need to preserve this wealth solely the perception of a
civilization? Is it merely another form of
coinage in such a civilization? What archaeologists will whisper its
story? Who can tell. Perhaps in spite of our futuristic predictions and
forecasts we know as little of the future as we do of the past. To quote the
title of David Lowenthal’s famous book The past is a foreign country in
response to which the truism has been said … we cannot live there.
Indeed can we not also say the same of the future?
Is there a future to be avoided?
One imaginary time traveler who attempted to explore that foreign country of the future recalled to his friends his observations on some monumental remnants of an ‘intellectual age’ as follows:
“ I went out of that gallery and into
another and still larger one,
which at the first glance reminded me of
a military chapel hung with tattered flags.
The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently
recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to
pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps
that told the tale well enough. Had I
been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility
of all ambition. But as it was, the
thing that struck me with keenest force
was the enormous waste of labour to which
this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought
chiefly of the PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS and my own seventeen papers upon
physical optics.” (H.G. Wells. The Time
Machine. http://www.literature.org/authors/wells-herbert-george/the-time-machine/chapter-08.html.
The story appeared in print in 1895 - London edition)