On Demand Information Delivery: Shifting from Local Collections to

Network Level Discovery and Delivery

Stephen Bosch University of Arizona Library

Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end - Seneca

Changes in the management of library collections/services are not happening in a vacuum – there are 3 basic drivers.

• The economy• Our users have migrated to a digital

world dominated by network level discovery and access to information• We now live in a world where

information is abundant, collections developed in a age of scarcity

It is the Economy.....

It’s The Economy…. Federal government funding of R&D as a fraction of GDP

has declined by 60 percent in 40 years. The increase in cost of higher education in America has

substantially surpassed the growth in family income in recent decades. United States current and former students have amassed over $1,000,000,000 in student loan debt.

The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities reported that 64% of the states cut funding for higher education in 2009-10.

National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO): 29 states anticipate lower spending in fiscal 2012, compared with pre-recession levels.

Thirty years ago, 10% of California’s general fund went to higher education and 3% to prisons. Today, nearly 11% goes to prisons and 8% to higher education.

United States consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the government devotes to energy R&D

And What about Libraries?

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

data since 1996 clearly shows funding for libraries in higher education has dramatically

shrunk as a % of total expenditures.

1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 20080.00%

2.00%

4.00%

6.00%

8.00%

10.00%

12.00%

3.64%

2.61%

10.6%

Comparison of % Total Expenditures for Libraries to Increases in Higher Ed based on NCES data

% Higher Education Expend for Library % Annual Increase in Total Expenditures

1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 20080%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

120%

140%

160%

180%

118.4%

57.0%

169.1%

Comparison of % Increase in Total Expenditures to Increase in Library Ex-penditures Based on NCES Data - With Serials Inflation

Total Expend Library Expend Serials Inflation

Research Universities and Higher Ed in general are key institutions in the creation of the Knowledge Capital, and Human Capital that are principal ingredients of innovation and competitiveness. Funding for these endeavors is increasingly hard to come by!

The Users Have Gone Digital!

Many surveys from several groups all reinforce the same themes:

Users are attracted to the ease of use they find

with network level search engines and information resources.

Mobile technology is growing – content context is king and it wants to go mobile.

Libraries and Librarians are trusted by users but easy and fast seems to be preferred over quality.

College students feel that search engines trump libraries for speed, convenience, reliability and ease of use. Libraries trump search engines for trustworthiness and accuracy, but convenience rules where students start their research......

OCLC Report: Perceptions of Libraries, 2010 Context and Community

Some Good News.......

Libraries Search Engines0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Libraries Are More Trustworthy

More trustwor-thy

More ac-curate

OCLC Report: Perceptions of Libraries, 2010 Context and Community

Some Bad News.......

OCLC Report: Perceptions of Libraries, 2010 Context and Community

College students are using:

E-Mail 99%

Library Web Site

57%Mobile Devices to Web

13%

Social Media Sites 81%

Ask-an-Expert Sites

52%

Wikipedia 88%

Search Engines 93%

Social Networking

Sites 92%

OCLC Report: Perceptions of Libraries, 2010 Context and Community

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011 found that 9 out of 10 students reported that they owned a mobile device that could access the internet .

Network level discovery and accessThis is where our users expect to conduct their

business and we need to have information service models that support that user experience.

Users desire the broadest possible access to information w/o dead ends – one way or another they want to be able to quickly obtain the discovered information.

Webscale discovery must be supported by delivery of information at the point of need.

There are no .edu sites in the top 1,000 websites and the .edu site with the most traffic is the University of Phoenix

30 years ago the largest aggregation of information would always be found in a local library

At that time buying books to build a collection was the best strategy for supplying users’ information needs since books/journals would go out of print and would soon be unavailable. Information was scarce.

Library catalogs and ILL services were just starting to become automated so building collections in areas of organizational strengths was a reasonable approach to meet needs.

Now - we live in a world where information is abundant and easily available

• There is no exact data for size of the Web – Google reported in 2008 that over 1 trillion pages with unique URLS had been discovered, others estimate the content to be 40 billion pages – either way this is a big number!

• 30 years ago the largest aggregation of information would always be found in a local library – now libraries pale in comparison to data in the web.

• There is no exact data for size of the Web – Google reported in 2008 that over 1 trillion pages with unique URLS had been discovered, others estimate the content to be 40 billion pages – either way this is a huge number!

• For comparison, If you assume that a single volume has 250 pages, the median ARL library has less than a billion pages in volumes held.

Information is widely available and the supply chain is radically different - books and journals no longer become scarce soon after publication due to digital publishing and distribution. Articles and book chapters can be acquired without buying the whole journal or book.

The discovery and delivery of information has moved beyond the walls of the local library.The collections and the services that were built around the local collection should all be heavily scrutinized.In an environment characterized by ubiquitous access to information and web scale information discovery and delivery, building and maintaining local collections may not be a sustainable strategy for meeting current and future users’ needs.

Collections

Acquiring

Circulation Bindery

Cataloging

Instruction

Reference

Formerly – Library Collections were the core of the Library with services built around the collections.

Interlibrary Loan

Local Collections

Hathi Trust OCLC Worldcat Google & Goggle Books

OA Repositories

E-journals & Books

Wikipedia

Social Networks

Web sites

The big question is – how do we move

current library information and

services to the cloud?

Local Collections

Hathi Trust OCLC Worldcat Google & Goggle Books

OA Repositories

E-journals & Books

Wikipedia

Social Networks

Web sites

Whether we like it or not the world of libraries is changing on many fronts

Library budgets ain’t what they used to be!

Users are comfortable in their digital Worlds

Networked, online information is everywhere all the time

Exactly what is Webscale discovery and delivery?

User’s want to be able to use information anytime, anywhere, anyhow.......

Users will prefer to use whatever search engine they are comfortable with

They use these tools to access information from favorite sites

The real game changers in how we organize our work and supply information to users include:

So what really changes for Libraries?

Changes in publishing and the distribution of content enable libraries to supply information at the point of need and allow a move away from “speculative” buying. Information can be delivered on demand.Digital publishing is eroding the “container” for information so access to individual articles and book chapters is possible w/o buying the whole “container”. Business, trade, and consumer journals are aggressively selling individual issues of journals w/o subscriptions via mobile devices.

What else really changes for Libraries?

Large academic libraries’ collections have had 2 overarching purposes, providing faculty and students with information they need for education and research, and to preserve the scholarly record. With the immediate information needs being supplied at the point of need from external sources, there will need to new approaches implemented in order to provide for the overall preservation of the scholarly record. Consortia, and shared digital and print repositories will have an increasingly important roles in preserving the scholarly record including prospective collecting.

What else really changes for Libraries?

Mass digitization projects like Google Books – Hathi Trust, Internet Archive shift a large part of local collections to the cloud. Hathi’s estimate is the average ARL collection has 40% overlap with Hathi. This has big implications for managing local print collections, preservation, and ILL.Shared print repositories (WEST, ASERL, etc.) likewise will have a large impact on local collections and ILL.

And what else really changes for Libraries?

Metadata management becomes the focus for Technical Services as processing of physical objects wanes. The process for credentialing use will be driven by metadata. It will be critical to have information in network level systems that enables the use of materials in shared/digital repositories. Metadata will need to be able to flow from supplier, to aggregator, to library, to consumer, etc. This may require the development of new standards concerning the transmission of metadata.

Content is going Mobile!Libraries are going to have to be able to deliver content and services to multiple devices. Like other Web providers libraries will need to be available, anywhere, anywhen, anyhow.

This is a significant threat and opportunity as most large publishers are rolling out mobile apps (at high expense) and frankly they don’t care if libraries are lost in the dust......

The future is already here -it's just not very evenly distributed William Gibson

DISCUSSION ????????

• Stephen Bosch University of Arizona Library 1510 East University PO Box 210055 Tucson, AZ 85721-0055 520-621-6452 520-621-8276 fax

• boschs@u.library.arizona.edu