Volume 16, Number 6 • June 1999
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Volume 16, Number 6 • June 1999 |
OCLC Adds to OCLC FirstSearch, Reports on International Library Directors’ Conference |
OCLC FirstSearch
OCLC has added 15 publishers, representing over 400 new professional
and academic journals, to its OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online
service, bringing the total number of titles signed to the service to more
than 2,100.
“Publishers recognize the value of aggregating titles from multiple sources into Electronic Collections Online, a single online collection from which libraries can select precisely what they need,” said Andrea Keyhani, OCLC’s manager of licensing and publisher relations. “OCLC provides additional value by integrating the journals with bibliographic databases from the FirstSearch service and other services OCLC offers the library community.”
The 15 publishers new to FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online are American Management Association, American Mathematical Society, American Meteorological Society, Applied Spectroscopy, Brookings Institution Press, Cambridge University Press, Edward Arnold, IOS Press, Mary Ann Liebert, MCB University Press, Oxford University Press, Rand, Swets & Zeitlinger, Thieme, and Walter de Gruyter.
“This most recent addition greatly expands the overall scope and prestige of the Electronic Collections Online collection with the inclusion of renowned university presses, professional societies, and association publishers, as well as leading international publishers,” said Keyhani.
Many of the new titles represent expansion in the social sciences and humanities with particular emphasis on economics and management, while the number of Electronic Collections Online titles in the scientific, medical, and technical areas continues to grow. All Electronic Collections Online titles are peer-reviewed and distributed worldwide.
Libraries that offer Electronic Collections Online allow users to search for citations by browsing lists of journals, selected issues, or selected topic areas. Abstracts and the full text of articles are available from those journals to which the library subscribes.
Electronic Collections Online journals are also available through the
OCLC FirstSearch service, the online reference service that provides a
common interface to 75 databases frequently used by students and researchers.
For a current list of publishers and journals available through Electronic
Collections Online, go to the Web site (http://www2.oclc.org/oclc/fseco/publish.htm).
Conference
Library leaders from 120 research universities and institutions in
23 countries met at OCLC on March 15-16 for the 17th Annual International
Conference of Research Library Directors to discuss dramatic changes in
business and technology and the impact those changes have had on libraries.
With the theme, “Transforming the Enterprise,” conference speakers included:
Aburdene spoke about business trends she has explored in her new book, Natural Born Companies: Your Ten-Part Plan for the New Digital Economy, to be published later this year. “In the new economy, nature is the model, the Internet is the metaphor, and chaos is the strategy,” said Aburdene. “By chaos I mean the willingness to release control, experiment with several different approaches, allow forces to converge, and just see what happens. Perfectionism is dead. It’s not about getting it right anymore; it’s about getting it going. Good-bye strategic planning, hello making-it-up-as-you-go-along.”
Aburdene suggested that librarians should be more active in promoting their roles in developing new information tools. “How do we reinvent libraries to thrive in this new economy? We recognize that in addition to talking to each other, libraries must begin a dialogue to increase their connections with the media, with business, and with the Internet community,” she said.
“Librarianship has a long and commendable position of resisting commercial reward for your work,” said Aburdene, who holds a master’s degree in library science. “My advice on that: Get over it. Sell your services to those who can afford it—specifically to businesses—to underwrite some of the free services we give to other deserving library patrons. You don’t have to sell your soul to thrive in the 21st century but you may have to sell your brain—and that is totally ethical.”
Likins spoke about “Transforming the University, an American Perspective.” He described his efforts to transform Lehigh University from what he called “a white-male-dominated engineering school” into a more diverse, expansive, and respected institution during his 15 years as president. He was named president of the University of Arizona in 1997.
Likins described some of the many changes he led at Lehigh. In 1984, when engineering enrollments across the nation peaked, the Lehigh Board of Trustees accepted a plan that shifted emphasis to the arts and sciences, and to graduate and research activities. In the summer of 1985, Lehigh put a personal computer on every professor’s desk. By 1986, the university had “the most pervasive network on any college campus, reaching into every room of every building—academic, residential, and administrative.” Campus size doubled to 1,600 acres. A new stadium, a new hall for the College of Business and Economics, and performing arts center were built. And women now make up about 40 percent of the student body.
“This is a very changed institution,” he said. “But it was rough. It was difficult. Transformation is a painful process.”
Likins said among the keys to successful transformation in an institution are communication and a clear vision. “Over the years, I’ve come to think of transformational change with a mental image I consciously conjure up as I implement change,” said Likins. “I think of the organization as a fabric that I’m trying to stretch into a desired shape. I know that if I stretch it too rapidly, it will break, and then you can’t put it back together again. If you don’t stretch it rapidly enough, the external pressures for change would eventually overwhelm you.
“So the trick is to listen carefully for the minute sounds of incipient rip in the fabric and to control the pace of change. Usually it’s the direction of change that’s easy. It’s the pace of change that’s hard. You can control the pace of change by listening to see if the fabric is about to rip. And with patience and persistent effort, you can shape that fabric almost any way you desire.”
Kuzmin described the tremendous transformations in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and since the economic collapse in the summer of 1998.
“Russia is a land of greater contrasts than any other country,” said Kuzmin. “It is a developed and developing country at once; a country of absolute democracy where totalitarian survivals are reigning; an affluent country of abject poverty; a backward country of high technologies … Similar contrasts meet us as we refer to Russian libraries.”
Kuzmin pointed out that the number of libraries in Russia decreased by 10 percent in the last 7 years, while usage is up 15 percent. He said a librarian’s average monthly wage is $25 compared to $100 before the financial crisis of last summer. And up to 80 percent of books just published never find their way to Russian library shelves because of the recent economic crisis. Despite difficult obstacles, Kuzmin is hopeful that libraries in Russia will progress.
“Russia has acquired an overwhelming majority of the most fruitful and daring ideas of Western librarianship,” he said. “Our librarians are imaginatively developing them and will implement them whenever they have the money.
“Is this possible, you may ask, after the financial crisis? This is possible in Russia, a country where ideas have tremendous power, and some of them are implemented even when they run counter to economic expediency.”
Shraiberg spoke specifically about library automation in Russia.
“According to our estimates, about 5,000 libraries apply automated technologies today,” said Shraiberg. “The total number of libraries that have bought hardware and software to solve separate tasks of their everyday library practice is much greater—15,000 to 20,000. The transfer to the automated technologies is restricted largely due to financial reasons.”
Telecommunications has also posed challenges for Russian libraries.
“Despite all the difficulties we encounter in the field of Internet resources development, the situation has been gradually improving here,” said Shraiberg. “Today, many libraries small and large use the Internet, not only as users but as host centers. In the near future, the Internet channels will undoubtedly become not only the means that enable access to global information resources, but will also provide a communication environment for domestic library information networks.”
During the panel discussion on “Publishing, Partnerships and Libraries,” Jensen discussed changes in publishing. A director of publishing technology at the National Academy Press, Jensen said dissemination of information has become the top priority in publishing for the National Academy Press and cost-recovery a close second, when just a few years ago it was the other way around.
“That small shift changes some of the directives that I give myself in terms of what is being prioritized in the development process,” said Jensen. “If something is available for free it means that a great deal more resources can be plowed into the quality of dissemination rather than trying to improve the marketability of the product. Scholarship is more than just presenting information; it should be enriching the content, making it easy to use. Now my job is to make access to the information as easy as possible.”
Yannuzzi spoke about the Vatican Library Accessible Worldwide project, a partnership between the Vatican and IBM to scan and digitize books from the more than 30 miles of shelves in the Vatican Library stacks and make them accessible over the Internet to scholars worldwide.
Yannuzzi said IBM is a hardware, software, consulting, and services business and is not in the business of electronic content distribution. “But we wanted a partnership so that we could learn with one of the premier cultural repositories in the world and then be able to guide other clients in the years ahead,” he said.
“We learned the technology is here,” Yannuzzi said. “We learned that intellectual property rights were manageable. But we also learned that we did the Vatican project backwards.” Once the technological pieces were in place, and many of the pages had been digitized, “nobody knew what to do with the information gathered.” The key to a successful digitizing project is to decide what to do with the digitized information first, and proceed from there, according to Yannuzzi.
Gosling spoke about transforming the university library in this era of technological change. “Academic libraries are especially challenged to realize transformation of the organization to meet the changing campus environment we see before us today,” said Gosling. “The challenge of academic libraries is compounded as we incorporate changes for newer services, while continuing the need to sustain many of our older services because they still have significant value to a large segment of the user population.”
Jay Jordan, OCLC president and chief executive officer, reviewed OCLC’s plans and activities. He also discussed some OCLC projects that illustrate how the organization has transformed its objectives as technology changes.
“OCLC’s Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project explores using automated cataloging tools and library cooperation to create a database of Web resources much the same way OCLC and member libraries created WorldCat (the OCLC Online Union Catalog),” said Jordan. “Through the CORC project, librarians will apply the traditional practices and principles of librarianship to the Web—extending the WorldCat shared cataloging model to the new electronic resources.”
Source: OCLC, Dublin, OH, 614/764-6000; Fax: 614/764-6096; http://www.oclc.org.
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