Editorial: Librarians and the Internet

(Journal of Librarianship & Information Science, 26 (3), 1994. p.117-119.)

The last five months have seen an explosion of media interest in the idea of com­puter networking and in the facilities afforded by the rapidly expanding Internet. Hardly a day now goes by without some newspaper reference to the benefits and problems afforded by a new community of computer users communicating with one another across international boundaries, unfettered by traditional barriers to such intercourse. More specialized weekly news publications such as the Times Higher Education Supplement and the professional press in many different disciplines also now regularly feature articles on various aspects of network­ing. Likewise there is now a considerable body of literature entirely devoted to the subject, including several shelves full of text books and several glossy monthly periodicals. In a recent survey, two of the ten most popular titles catalogued by OCLC libraries world-wide during 1993 related to the Internet (Crook and Campbell, 1994). There have also been several exhibitions to exploit the commercial opportunities of networking, and conferences to discuss the long term implications for our lives. In the UK there has also been a prime-time weekly television magazine programme on the subject. On the day I am writing this editorial, a report in a normally reliable newspaper claims there are already more than 35 million users with the figure growing at the rate of twenty per cent per month (Rosen, 1994). This means that there is likely to be 75 million users by the time the editorial is published, and well over 250 million within a year.1

What then is the Internet? and why has there been this sudden interest by the mass media? As with many wide area networks it is not a coherent physical entity - such as a net­work of dedicated fibre-optic cables, to which computers may be connected. Nor is it a separately administered route through which computer traffic between related sites may pass - such as JANET, the United Kingdom's Joint Academic Network. The Internet is rather a means by which more than ten thousand existing networks may communicate with one

another, by using a common set of rules known as the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Messages may be sent between two sites by innumerable different routes, depending upon the volume of existing traffic, and indeed component parts of a single message are likely to follow many different paths before being reconstituted at their destination. There is no reliance on any single part of the Internet - a portion of which could disappear at any moment - but the net­work as a whole is extremely robust (Krol, 1994). The computer users at either end do not need to concern themselves with the route taken by the communication, merely with the net­work addresses of the sending and receiving computers.

Reliable and cheap computer communication has been theoretically possible since the devel­opment of packet switching in the 1960s, although not widely available until the mid 1970s.Since then this technology has been an essential factor in the growth international computing and the use of online information retrieval services. Similarly the idea behind the Internet has been around for nearly two decades and derives from the US Defense Department's requirement for a communication system which could withstand partial disruption from enemy action whilst still functioning. Various facilities of the Internet have been available to academic communities for some years, notably international electronic mail, and the innumerable USENET News discussion groups on every conceivable subject.2 These facilities provide cheap, timely, and effective means of discussing current issues or asking questions of special­ists or others interested in a particular field throughout the world. One has to say that contributions to many of the USENET News discussion groups are frequently puerile, verbose, or else incredibly obscure, and some of the questions posted might easily have been answered by a half-competent reference librarian and a basic stock of printed books. Yet at the same time many contributions are thoughtful and challenging, and some of the questions asked simply could not have been answered from traditional sources. There is also evidence that researchers in many disciplines are using USENET to discuss their research, thereby short-circuiting the long lead times of traditional journals.

The Internet also provides the facility for remote login to interrogate and explore other computers world-wide, for example enabling the user of one library OPAC to access another. Also there is also a protocol to transfer data files or programs in many different formats across continents for use or further processing on the receiving computer.

Since most of these features have been in fairly widespread use among the academic communities for several years, why then has the Internet suddenly come into the public eye so forcefully? The answer to this question is two-fold. Firstly there have been recent dramatic improvements in the software tools to locate and retrieve information over the network, lead­ing to developments such as Internet Gophers, and the World Wide Web, which takes advan­tage of hypertext links. Secondly there has been a recent recognition of the power of computer networking by both officialdom and commerce.

With the development of distributed client-server computing - of which the Gopher and World Wide Web 'tools' are examples - access to the network has been radically improved. The user interface and operating environment can now be determined by the end-user's local software running on his or her own computer rather than that of the remote host. Thus if the end-user is used to working within a UNIX environment, or with a graphical user interface such as Microsoft Windows this may be done, irrespective of the operating system employed by the computer on which the data is stored. This has led to the development of easy to use tools such as Mosaic, for accessing the World Wide Web using Windows, and to retrieve a combination of rich text, high-resolution images, and sound. Many of these are freely available from the network. Electronic documents retrieved from the Internet may now contain much of the associated information that has hitherto been lost - such as the integration of text and graphics, and a variety of type designs, sizes and styles - all of which help in the process of reading. It has always been easier to search or re-order computerized documents than print equivalents, but increasingly these technical devel­opments assist with the process of browsing or skimming.

The technical developments described above have paved the way for more interest by government and business. Hitherto most of the information on the Internet was made freely available to anyone with the capacity to make the necessary connections to retrieve it. Much of the information has been haphazardly organized and is of very mixed reliability, frequently placed there by computer enthusiasts rather than those with any skills or training within the fields of publishing or information retrieval. However the rapid growth and proven reliability of the network together with the development of user-friendly access tools has created a snow-ball effect. All those concerned with the dissemination and control of in­formation, whether for official or commercial purposes, have begun to take a close interest in the Internet. Government agencies have begun to note how useful it can be for disseminating information, whilst at the same time noting the difficulties of controlling traffic or censoring information, and much of the media coverage has highlighted the so-called 'anarchy' on the network. For example, in 1989 USENET was widely used for supplying academics both in China and throughout the world with up-to-the-minute news about the events surrounding the Tiananmen Square massacre, which could not be prevented by government censors. Fears have also been expressed for the potential misuse of the technology. On the one hand this may be by its use in disseminating pornography or in the execution of other crimes such as drug-traffick­ing or money laundering. Equally there are worries about its potential for misuse by governments or big business in terms of the invasion of individual privacy or the dissemination of misinformation or propaganda, or merely as a channel for advertising material and 'junk' mail.

A most interesting and illuminating demonstration of the power of the Internet was in the drumming up of international support to the beleaguered School of Library and Information Science at the University of California-Berkeley during the summer of 1993. The volume of messages of support from librarians and academics throughout the world was such that the university authorities were forced to reconsider their planned closure, at least in the short term. Whether this will have any permanent effect remains to be seen.

In the commercial world, the Internet is beginning to be recognized as a communi­cation channel for all kinds of traffic and the volume of use is certain to grow rapidly, and a range of new kinds of specialized information services is growing up. Even the providers of established commercial online information retrieval services, who for decades have been con­tent to rely upon crude teletype or VT100 standard user interfaces, are beginning to realise that their information may be made available over the network to clients with far more sophis­ticated access tools. A product such as Mosaic could

give to an online vendor all of the advan­tages of a multi-media CD-ROM product, whilst still retaining the ability to keep the infor­mation constantly up to date.

So what are the implications of all this for librarians and other information workers? Firstly the use of computer networks is hardly new to libraries in the developed world. Access to co-operative cataloguing ventures such as OCLC or Libertas, or to commercial online services via academic or commercial networks has been an important aspect of library work for several years. In the United Kingdom, the UKOLN (the Office for Library and Information Networking) was established early in 1990 to educate and explain the possibilities of network­ing and help to co-ordinate a great deal of existing activity in this field.

However the volume of network traffic and the range of potential sources is likely to increase rapidly during the next few years, and will become increasingly international in scope. As outlined in Jenny Rowley's recent article in this journal, document delivery, as opposed to bibliographic refer­ences is likely to be the next major growth area of network traffic, with opportunities for libraries to provide effective current awareness services specifically targeted at individuals or groups of users. Already there are serious discussions by some academic librarians about the feasibility of cancelling journal subscriptions and replacing them with subscriptions to the growing knowledge warehouse projects.

The network is likely to change fundamentally the economics of publishing and the book trade. All kinds of publishers are looking closely at the electronic distribution of their wares, as an alternative to the costly process of hard-copy publishing, and this is creating all kinds of diffi­culties over such things as protection of copyright. Many specialized texts will be in future be published only in an electronic form, and perhaps only ever appear in hard copy, if at all, at the terminals of customers. There will also be the opportunity for individual custom­ers, or insti­tutions, to create and design their own books, selecting a chapter from one source, a diagram from another, a commentary from a third, and bibliographic references from a fourth. This will of course have important implications for the collection policies of all kinds of libraries.

Amongst all the media coverage, I have seen more than one prediction that the devel­opment of the Internet signals the end for books and libraries as we know them, and also the need for information professionals to help exploit them. However one only has to spend a little time exploring the apparent disorganisation and confusion and ploughing through some of the intellectual garbage currently on the network to realise that there is an urgent need for information pro­fessionals to assist in the process of organizing, evaluating, and updating the information there, and guiding potential users to what it is they are seeking. This is a task which the computer scientists, for all their impressive technological skills, have shown themselves incapable of performing alone. There are many projects, world-wide, attempting to address this problem, many of which involve librarians, and indeed some have been instigated by librarians. The work of Traugott Koch and others at the University of Lund library in Sweden who are working on the indexing of WWW servers is an example.

In the quarter of a century that I have worked as a librarian or as an educator of librarians I have witnessed a number of technological 'threats' to my livelihood or to that of my students, including microfilm, PCMI 'ultrafiche', tape-slide productions, videocassettes, videotex, online information retrieval services, electronic journals, personal computers, CD-ROM and other optical products. Most of these technologies have made an impact upon our lives and found their niche as formats for new information products both within libraries and in the world at large. Yet the number of books printed each year, and the number of hard copy periodical titles has continued to grow year by year. Any form of prediction in the area of information technology is unwise, but on past performance I would venture a small bet that the phenomenal growth of the Internet will not result in the wholesale closure of existing libraries, and the unemployment of librarians. I suspect that the range of information potentially available, and the complexity of the processes of information retrieval mean that there will always be a role for 'libraries' or 'information centres' of one form or another, employing skilled intermediaries, although perhaps the traditional concept of collection build­ing is now a thing of the past.

I will therefore venture to suggest that the growth of computer networking should be seen much more as an opportunity for the library and information professions as a whole than a threat, at least for those among us who are willing to adopt the new ideas and adapt to the new techniques. I suspect that the Internet may prove to be the single most important factor influencing our professional lives in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

David Stoker

May 1994

(With thanks to Su James at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth for comments and criticisms given in person, and to John Smith at UKOLN for the same provided over the network.)

References

1. Crook, Mark and Campbell, Nancy (1994) The most popular books of 1993. OCLC Newsletter, March/April, 8

2. Krol, Ed (1994) The whole Internet user's guide and catalog. O'Reilly & Associates

3. Rosen, Nick (1994) The road to knowledge, The Guardian. 19 May 1994, 16

 

Notes

1.   These figures are perhaps an exaggeration, the latest figures from the Internet Society are 20 million and 10% per month growth rate (John Smith).

2.   Strictly speaking USENET News both pre-dates and overlays the Internet, although the bulk of its use is via this communications channel. It is a messaging system developed for UNIX computers, and as such is available to users on networks which are not otherwise TCP/IP compatible (John Smith).