Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Fay Gale
The future of research libraries
At the beginning of March a workshop was held in Canberra to discuss the future of Australia's research libraries in the electronic age. 'Australia's information future: information and knowledge management for the 21st century' drew on a range of participants from across Australia and overseas and covered all of the major issues facing the management of research data and publications in these times of rising costs and changing technology.
I spoke on behalf of the Academy on 'Research needs for the new millennium: issues for the Social Sciences'. For fellows, ready access to research material is vital. That access is being greatly facilitated by the electronic means of communication but at the same time it is being increasingly limited by the rising costs of virtually all materials especially journals. All research libraries are trying to develop new ways of dealing with these issues at a time of diminishing financial resources for university libraries. Australian social scientists depend upon cost effective access to global scholarly information and knowledge. On the face of it electronic access seems the answer. Indeed most of us now depend very heavily on computer technology in all areas of our research as well as our personal lives. A virtual Australian library, even if only partial, would gain some independence from the currency fluctuations that currently plague our university libraries. But the new technology can also be a mine field, particularly for those of us who developed our research skills and methods before this electronic revolution.
For all our willingness to embrace this technology, as indeed we must, there remain a number of issues of concern to scholars and many of these have not yet been dealt with adequately. One of greatest concerns is probably quality control. Anyone can publish on the 'web'. Indeed we are now bombarded with information, much of it of dubious value. The internet can be an exchange of ignorance as well as of knowledge. Discernment is more difficult on the screen than in print form. We are given the sense that all information is of equal value. How can we ensure authenticity and peer review and how do we guard against plagiarism? I cannot help but be reminded of TS Eliot's prophetic statement in 'The Rock':
- Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
- Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Whilst anyone can 'publish' on the web only a few can have their work published in high quality, scholarly, refereed journals. We need to ensure a system of rigorous refereeing of material that can then be given a quality label and protected against plagiarism. The electronic means are there, via techniques such as water marking, but adapting them for the best development, evaluation and management of research still needs a lot of work.
These issues are of particular concern to social scientists who deal primarily with people. Ethics and confidentially are key factors in much of our research. How do we ensure these and protect our informants?
Social scientists also depend greatly on currently printed and archival material. As our libraries are forced, for financial as well as management reasons, to store material electronically we have good reason to be concerned about who makes the decisions as to what will be archived electronically, and what will be left to just disappear. Will the advantages that more can be archived electronically with less space outweigh the losses? The transfer from print to electronic storage is initially costly. So who decides the guide lines for what is and is not transferred?
We already see in our students an increasing dependence on secondary sources. Will this be accentuated? How do we protect primary sources when they are judged too expensive or difficult to transfer? Plagiarism becomes harder to detect with electronic referencing. There is a greater opportunity to gain credit for reinventing the wheel. Electronic referencing can also suggest an ephemeral nature to knowledge. I have too often been given a web reference and by the time I have looked it up it has gone or been replaced. The electronic access can thus give an impression that all knowledge is ephemeral in nature. How do we ensure that quality markers differentiate the long term material of substance from the largely irrelevant?
Without questioning the enormous benefit of modern electronic means for the development and dispersal of knowledge we need to be alert to the fact that electronic networks are not only changing our access to knowledge they are also affecting the way knowledge is being created. What is not amenable to instant electronic means of analysis and dispersal is in danger of being side-stepped. Social scientists are concerned that much of the material they wish to access tends to be in ideas, arguments and discourse as much as in data collection or experimental results. With limited resources we see a danger that material which lends itself more readily and cheaply to electronic transfer will be given preference over some of the seemingly esoteric but in the long term crucial knowledge for our cultural and economic survival.
The protection of intellectual property and the copyright of Australian authors becomes an even greater nightmare. Copyright is already a nightmare for Australian authors and universities. What was supposed to protect and reward us has become costly to our universities and an inadvertent mechanism for transferring Australian educational dollars to large overseas publishers. I remember being furious the first time I discovered that the university had to pay copyright for me to copy sections of one of my own books for students. How much more will we have to pay to use our own intellectual property when the publication is largely in an electronic form?
Under the distribution of research funds under the so called performance based funding mechanism of the research quantum, academics must publish. To do so nowadays they are usually forced to transfer their copyright to publishers who are then the beneficiaries of the Australian government's attempt to protect Australian intellectual property. This process already has enormous inequities for Australian researchers and must become even more so with electronic publishing.
Nevertheless we are moving relentlessly towards electronic and virtual libraries. The earliest on line information for education purposes was an Australian and not an American invention. The world's first school of the air was developed by a South Australian teacher called Adelaide Miethke. She adapted the invention of the pedal powered, long distance wireless to bring education to children in the outback. It opened in June 1951 and at the time seemed a great technological revolution. I remember the time I watched two children shift for the first time from their correspondence lessons, that often took weeks to arrive, to the immediate response and interaction as they pedalled to give the wireless power. Their joy at the benefits of the new technology was infectious. For the first time it mattered not where you were or who you were. Such freedom is rapidly becoming the normal way of research. We are communicating so easily with fellow researchers at considerable distances where time zones no longer matter.
The benefits we acknowledge and use daily. This workshop was to help researchers assess the pitfalls and prepare for the inevitable and rapid changes. The workshop attempted to evaluate our research needs into the next millennium. Not surprisingly the report 'Investment in Information and Knowledge Infrastructure: A Strategic Framework for Australia's Research Enterprise', is being written interactively and distributed electronically.
Fay Gale
1999
Last modified: 2 November 2009.