Hay-ride-tourby Eric Lease Morgan, Systems Librarian, North Carolina State University
The United States Agriculture Information Network (USAIN) held its 1995 Annual Meeting in
Lexington, KY, April 26-29. While I was not able to attend the entire conference, this
travel log documents the events I was able to attend.
Hay-ride-tour
The conference began with a number of pre-conference Internet workshops, but things did not really begin to happen until the attendees were treated to a visit to the Kentucky Horse Park. At the park we got to see the grave of Man o' War, and more horses than you could "shake a stick at," including John Henry. In order to see the entire 1000+ acres of farm, some attendees opted for a hay ride. The farm also had a very nice horse museum. (Of course I was most interested in the Morgan horses.) After a meal of fried chicken and barbecue, we were entertained by clogging-style dancers. The whole event was a good ice breaker.
McClain Family CloggersThe Meeting was officially brought to order by Cynthia Via, the President of USAIN. She
made a few management remarks and introduced the first speaker.
Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
presented "Of Information Highways and Byways: Networked Communication and
Publication Strategies for the Rest of the 1990's and Beyond." He began by saying
libraries are in the vanguard of the Information Age and we should "get up in the
morning and say `I'm in the vanguard.'" At the same time he believes the language of
the "digital library" has not stabilized yet and there are still many aspects of
these new technologies that need to be explored. In many ways, libraries are like canaries
in a cage being sent into hazardous areas to see how we survive. To strengthen our
position we need to develop a theory of digital libraries; understand its causes and
effects; predict how people will use the resources and scholarly communication; build a
relationship between libraries and users; and look for ways to become more theoretical.
Peter's Special Theory or guidelines for such a theory include:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/eric-talks-at-usain.html
"Property Rights in Cyperspace: Copyright Law in the Internet Era" was then
delivered by David Shipley of the University of Kentucky College of Law. This presentation
offered more questions than answers and tried, in a small way, to predict a bit of the
future when it comes to copyright. Some of those questions included:
Shipley then alluded to the possibility of publishers skirting the copyright issues and
fair use issues through the use of licenses. These licenses will provide restrictions that
fair use would normally accommodate, but since the licenses are binding contracts, the
issues of fair use which libraries have enjoyed will be eliminated. He also mentioned a
number of issues being discussed by the NII working group and how their recommendations
may effect copyright and libraries. In summary, Shipley said there are no clear cut
answers to these problems and "everything is constantly changing."
Janet Poley of A*DEC Corporation gave an articulate presentation "Connected We Can
Learn--Distance Education of the Agriculture Community." She began by stating that
people are looking to the information highway as a vehicle for education. She then
discussed how we, as librarians, can be players in this new environment. The traditional
learning method is not as effective as it could be. We need a national learning
infrastructure, including workplace, home, distance education, and outreach.
Poley stated that globalization, demographics, technology, and disintegration of higher
education's "ivory tower" are all part of this change. Three factors, according
to the PEW Roundtable, for change include privatization, technological change, and
vocationalization.
Poley said we must figure out how to sustain the information we create when, at the same
time, we want to give it away. How do we put a value on the information? She then
enumerated a number of ways we can handle change ranging from entrepreneurship to expense
reduction. There are four cultures in higher education: Collegial; Managerial;
Developmental; and Negotiation. Changes in higher education will have to include these
various cultures.
Poley then enumerated a number of issues involving change ranging from accreditation,
external forces, reduction of public funding, to monopolies of information, being
producers of information as opposed to only being a consumer.
The last session I attended on Thursday was given by Jan Olsen, Director of the Mann
Library, Cornell University. The title of her presentation was "Preservation Through
Electronic Means: Updates on the Core Agricultural Literature Project at Mann Library and
the National Preservation Program." This presentation outlined and described the
national effort for the preservation of agricultural information. She began by giving us a
history of the plan from its inception in 1991 resulting in the "Purple Plan" in
1993 [Editor's note: A National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature,
by Nancy E. Gwinn, et al., May 1993, was originally distributed with a purple cover]. The
plan listed the pivotal types of agricultural literature genres including: manuscripts;
land-grant publications; State/county documents; pre-1862 imprints; unique collections in
library institutions, significant at the local level; Federal documents; core popular and
trade journals; and scholarly books and journals.
The plan suggested the appointment of a national coordinator for a 3 year term who would
create momentum for the plan. Technologies for preservation purposes were to be hybrid in
form: microfilm and electronic. Pieces of the information would be used to create a
bibliography of these materials and provide mechanisms for delivering the information
(quite possibly over the Internet).
Mann Library of Cornell University was selected as one of the libraries to begin doing
some of this preservation from the 9 states that were qualified for participation. Mann
staff began by creating a universe of documents through lists of subjects from numerous
New York collections. Items from this list were then prioritized using expertise drawn
from scholars. This aspect of the work was very interesting. To date the preservation work
of the Mann Library includes 577 monographs and 633 serial volumes. Many have been
microfiched. Forty-seven percent (47%) of the documents have been preserved. Twenty
percent (20%) of the items are copyrighted. Olsen discussed the difficulties in trying to
get the rights to copy. This part of the project was also notable and could easily be used
as a model for other copyrighted materials.
The day began with a number of contributed papers in the form of concurrent sessions. I
went to "Session II: Development of Internet Resources" where the first paper
was given by Barbara Hutchinson of the Arid Lands Information Center (ALIC) entitled
"Building an Arid Lands Information Network on the Internet." Hutchinson began
by listing the tools and the resources ALIC used to create its World Wide Web service:
purpose, people, computers, internet connection, server software, production software,
browsers, cataloging/indexing software, search/retrieval software. Hutchinson went on to
list the sorts of information put on the Web server (e.g., newsletters, a biodiversity
project, and the Linkages Project) and then compared and contrasted the electronic
versions of the newsletters with the printed versions. She believes ALIC has improved
primary communications methods with the use of the Web.
Kenneth Sochats of the School of Library and Information Science Laboratories, University
of Pittsburgh then presented "Promenade: An Internet Database Server for a Virtual
Botanical Library." Essentially, Sochats presented the developments of a research
grant from the National Agriculture Library (NAL) to make available image collections over
the Internet including the Curtis Botanical prints and an image collection of plant pests
and diseases. When this project began, the WWW was not available and it was initially
intended to compare the use of the Internet with the use of CD-ROM to distribute the
collection. After the development of HTML+ (forms-capible HTML), the focus changed to
creation of a database server.
Susan G. Schram of the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network
(CIESIN) outlined what her organization is doing to disseminate information in the
"USDA Global Change Data Assessment and Integration Project." The purpose of
CIESIN is to make data and information available to people who need it in areas of
agriculture and the environment. One of their goals has been to locate the various data
sets available from the agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). A
search engine enabling the researcher to search these multiple databases through the
Internet with a single query is being developed. Much of the organization's information is
being put on the Web as possible, and "data rescue" for data sets "at
risk" is being explored. These datasets include paper-based records of environmental
statistics dating from as far back as 1915, etc.
The last session I went to was entitled "Document Delivery in the Electronic
Environment" presented by John Ulmschneider of the North Carolina State University
Libraries. Instead of describing the Triangle Research Library Network's Document Delivery
Project, Ulmschnieder outlined qualities of document delivery and what document delivery
systems need to incorporate in order to be effective, including: conceiving the desire for
an item, ordering the item at the point of desire, processing the order automatically,
delivering the item, providing the item in an appropriate format, billing for the item. He
then listed who was doing document delivery and described how these services worked. He
went on to describe our present interlibrary loan departments as third-party
intermediaries doing document delivery but one of the more differentiating because they
provide things other than articles (like books and videotapes) and they lend to other
services. He then outlined the ideal picture for document delivery from the libraries and
users perspective. Some of these things are happening already like automatic verification,
location of items using unique identifiers, automatic transmission and monitoring, and
automatic delivery of requested items. Finally, he diagrammed the document delivery
process that is being implemented as a part of the TRLN Document Delivery Project.
Ulmschieder predicted the increase of cost in document delivery services and the real
possible risk that document delivery may drastically change the face of librarianship.
The conference was well planned and small enough to get acquainted with
the fellow attendees. While many of the attendees did not seem to be presently exploiting
the networked environment to its fullest degree, everybody was genuinely interested in the
topic.
I think that if copyright issues are to be determined by licenses, and if the information
environment of the future will be driven by market forces, then we librarians should just
say "No" to licenses, and consequently we can control the marketplace.
Remember to include the qualities of readability, browsability, and searchability into
your information systems.
The national preservation program as initiated by the Mann Library seems like an excellent
model.
Finally, libraries, as institutions must adapt with the times and the technologies. This
conference exemplified the realization of the need to adapt.
NOTE: The above report is a slightly edited version of Eric Lease Morgan's electronic
document, "USAIN '95: A travel log," which can be found at:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/usain-95/
Morgan
Eric Lease Morgan, author of the preceding report, is a systems librarian at the North Carolina State University Libraries, Box 7111, Room 2316-b, Raleigh, NC 27695-7111; eric_morgan@ncsu.edu; http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/. He has a BA in Philosophy from Bethany College, Bethany, WV (1982), and an MIS from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA (1987). Eric considers himself a librarian first and a computer user second. His professional goal is to discover new ways to use computers to improve library service.