Last Updated: May 3, 1994 _________________________________________________________________________ Libraries and the NII DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENT Policymakers must determine how to sustain, in the electronic age, the democratic and equal access to information that free public libraries have provided in the age of print. [footnote 1: Statement by James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, at the "Delivering Electronic Information in a Knowledge-Based Democracy" (DEIKBD) conference; proceedings, 4.] PART I: What Is the Application Arena? Description of Libraries The Traditional Role of Libraries. Libraries are central to the storage and sharing of knowledge, history, and culture. They offer access to knowledge and information representing diverse sources and viewpoints. Libraries are adjuncts to education, a base for generating innovative thinking, a stimulus to culture, and an aid to the individual self-development of citizens. They are also keepers of the intellectual, cultural, and historical memory of their community. Libraries acquire, catalog, make available, and preserve collections in all media. These collections traditionally consist of material items stored in site-specific facilities which limit access to those who can travel to the site of that library or receive the items through interlibrary loan. Whenever an item is in use, it is temporarily unavailable to all other people. Libraries have developed in response to the nature and character of the publishing communities. In the United States, libraries have served as information "equalizers" or providers of equal access for all, permitted by the first sale [footnote 2: The first sale doctrine of copyright is the information equalizer in that it limits copyright owners' rights by making only the initial distribution of a particular copy of a work subject to the owner's control. Section 108 of the copyright code allows libraries to make copies of certain works under certain conditions both for patrons and other libraries.] doctrine of copyright law to lend copies of copy righted works after their initial distribution. The Role of Libraries in the NII. The ability of digital libraries to store and share knowledge, history, and culture will be central to the success of the NII. The digital library [footnote 3: "Digital library" is used here as an aggregate, implying electronic access to many sources of digital information. This includes libraries but does not exclude other sources such as corporate, government, and research entities.] is really a library with extensive electronic collections in a variety of forms in different locations. Increasingly materials are being acquired in electronic form; libraries are beginning to convert their paper and analog collections to machine-readable formats for both preservation and spatial reasons. As today, the role of libraries in the future will be to advocate and help provide information equity for the public. Libraries will continue to coordinate and facilitate preservation of the records and expressions of the nation's intellectual and cultural life both in traditional and digital formats. Libraries will be sources of free or inexpensive digital information; provide access to an improved flow of electronic government information and world-wide digitized resources; request and be sent copies of remotely stored documents and other publications as allowed by copyright licensing and other agreements; make digitized reproductions of rare and unique material that is in the public domain or for which permission of the copyright owner is available as allowed under the copyright law; and provide long-term access to the records and expressions of culture and scholarship. The evolving information infrastructure is already dramatically changing traditional operations within and relationships among libraries and their providers and users. It is also offering new challenges. New forms of unpublished, and often unauthenticated, digitized materials are emerging as millions of people are linked by world-wide networks. The volume of new digital material, if it were on paper, would eventually dwarf the existing physical collections. The situation is additionally complex because digitized information can be easily updated, manipulated, and combined with other materials, and displayed in multiple ways. Digital data thus creates enormous new amounts of knowledge that maybe accessed and manipulated by computers, existing temporarily and never stored anywhere permanently. Institutions, including libraries, may provide access to these materials without ever physically controlling them, and readers at multiple sites have access to the same material at the same time. Future Role of Librarians. The role of librarians will change significantly as they become increasingly viewed as managers of both information and knowledge. This forward-looking perspective was underscored at the Library of Congress (LOC) conference on "Delivering Electronic Information in a Knowledge-Based Democracy" [proceedings, 5]. These knowledge management skills may take many forms and can be expected to involve librarians in all facets of the information chain. Librarians may be present at the information generation process; they will help manage digital materials and assist people in dealing with the plethora of information. Librarians will increasingly function as facilitators, enablers, and teachers of network users; library systems and consortia will negotiate information access rights [footnote 4: "Access" implies a complex of possibilities. It includes online viewing either by one or many users, printing, downloading, transmitting the work to the libraries, modem access, public performance, and public display. This list while not all-inconclusive does suggest the complexity of the access issue which must be addressed by copyright law as well as by vision and technology. To paraphrase Barbara Ringer's statement at the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration Hearing on March 3, 1994: It is obvious that we are at the beginning of an enormous revolution in communications. What isn't obvious is that the copyright law is at the center of this revolution and will determine the course it takes. The bulk of the material to be transmitted on the superhighway is copyrighted, it is intellectual property that is owned by someone.] on behalf of public users of the digital library. Librarians will become guides to network tools in much the same way as they have acted as guides to the use of traditional materials. New Roles and Alliances.|en|New roles and alliances are expected to emerge. The originators of published and unpublished information are being empowered by the new digital information tools to carry out many of the services previously fulfilled by libraries: from subject-driven information delivery to navigational services and from onsite access to virtual access as providers of research tools. This could expand the concept of "libraries" to include not only collections maintained by traditional libraries but also those held by publishers, research organizations, universities, commercial enterprises, and new players of all kinds. While the digital library within the context of the NII is a national initiative, there are significant international implications both for the sharing of information across national borders and for the shift in the organization of intellectual creativity. Questions of international cooperation and economic competition will arise. Because the infrastructure permits international access to digital information in a way that is impossible in the traditional library model, new international relationships and models can and will emerge. Without taking into account from the outset rules for effective protection of intellectual property, the development of an international system (the Global Information Infrastructure (GII)) will be severely hindered. In a global system a user in one country will be able to manipulate information resources in another country in ways that may violate that country's copyright laws. Copyright laws are territorial; international copyright conventions and other multilateral agreements allow for significant differences in national laws. Work must begin on international harmonization of copyright laws to accommodate a digital world. The Application. Digital libraries in the NII will contain vast amounts of digitized data: text, pictures, audio, and video. The data will not be located at any single site, but rather will consist of digitized materials and processing methods from many sources. The development of digital collections in libraries will depend on the following components: - Interconnected and Interoperable Networks. Digital libraries are premised on the existence of a network of networks, interconnected and interoperable. - Decentralized Data and Processing. A second assumption concerning the digital library is that information and knowledge can exist and processing can take place at multiple, decentralized sites. - Databases. Digital libraries will contain data that only exists digitally and digitized data that has been converted from another medium such as print, sound, or audio. Developing techniques to consistently collect, store, and archive digital material using automated methods is an important first task for the digital library community. The conversion of existing material to digital form also is important. This converted material will form the nucleus of the digital database and provide a bridge to traditional collections. - Navigation and Retrieval Tools. Navigation and retrieval tools capable of identifying, accessing, and retrieving the digital resources must be developed. When practical, major navigation and retrieval tools will be based on standards that ensure the ability to communicate in order to share both data and processing. - Document Delivery. The ability to deliver physical copies in print or in any of several fixed digital formats must be supported. [footnote 5: Document delivery, while a technical component of the applications, involves significant copyright issues that must be resolved. Downloading substantial amounts of copyrighted material will require license agreements with related questions of who will pay and how will they be administered. Guidelines must be developed as to what are insubstantial amounts of downloaded materials, subject to fair use exemptions. - Presentation standards and techniques to assure reliable and effective representation of intellectual content must be created. - Mass Storage. The ability to store increasing amounts of data at steadily decreasing costs is a technological trend that is vital to the massive amounts of data that digital libraries will need to store and support. - Human Resources. The most critical success factor for the success of digital libraries will be the human resources component. This component assumes the education of a new generation of librarians as knowledge navigators; training and retraining of current librarians; and training of the public in the new technology and the use of electronic information resources. Benefits of Applications in This Arena The benefits of linked digital libraries include continued and expanded access to current information and access to historical material in unparalleled detail. Technical barriers to information sharing will largely disappear. Using libraries as gateways to the digital network can help ensure that information is accessible to all and prevent the formation of a society divided into information haves and "have-nots." Libraries must continue to play their vital role of information safety net for the public by providing access to and promoting literacy of digital materials much as they have for printed materials. This is particularly true of libraries' role in providing access to and navigation of the plethora of government information that is to be made available electronically. As Senator Edward Kennedy recently stated [quoted in McClure et al, 38]: Public libraries are a vital information link between the government and the public...libraries must continue to play a critical role in providing broad access to the public...[and guiding] citizens of all ages through the world of computer networks...[L]ibraries will make the government less remote and more responsive to the needs of individual citizens. Measures of Success of Digital Libraries An important measure of library success is use. An example of this is LOCIS, the Library of Congress Online System, that was made available via the Internet in April 1993. While Internet LOCIS was only available for 8 months of fiscal year 1993, Internet transactions accounted for 6 percent of the total number of LOC mainframe computer transactions in 1993. It is projected that Internet transactions will account for more than 12 percent of the total number of mainframe transactions in fiscal year 1994. Rising usage statistics and positive public response demonstrate that Internet access to LOCIS is a success. The same type of measurement must be applied to the digital environment. When there is substantial use of electronic information, particularly of items not otherwise available, then success that can be measured has been achieved. Other indicators of success of digital libraries are changes of patterns of patron service and demands. If patrons indicate a preference for digital forms, then this new form of material is a success. This has already happened in large part for library catalogs. Some indirect measures of success include decreased costs of processing, managing, and storing materials and increased availability of resources. PART II: Where Are We Now? Libraries Demographics. There are 87,000 public and private school libraries, 9,000 local public libraries, 4,600 college and university libraries, plus hundreds of specialized business libraries and federal and state libraries in American today. More than 182,000 professionals work in libraries [Billington, 109]. Connectivity. Based on the preliminary results of a national survey of public libraries sponsored by the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) and executed by Professors Chuck McClure (Syracuse) and Doug Zweizig (Wisconsin-Madison), approximately 21.1 percent of the responding libraries are currently connected to the Internet and 78.9 percent are not. However, 84.6 percent of the responding public libraries serving populations of 500,000 or more are connected, while only 13.3 percent of the libraries serving populations of less than 5,000 have Internet connectivity. Of the 1,400 depository libraries, 929 (68.1 percent) have access to email via Internet, Bitnet, or other electronic service; 716 (52.5 percent) depository libraries have file transfer; a survey question concerning telnet or remote database access capability was not included in the survey [US/GPO]. Government Applications Several federal agencies of importance to libraries have been mandated to develop applications using the NII. The applications have involved electronic publishing and conversion, navigation and retrieval tools, interoperability standards for information transfer between different networks or different hardware and software systems with reliability and accuracy, copyright management in an electronic environment, and archival efforts. Of the programs cited, the Government Printing Office (GPO) Access Act and the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) Grants program support operations. All of the other programs noted are research and development (R&D) efforts. Some agencies, recognizing the potential of networked information, have begun network efforts as part of improving existing services. These are listed under Operational Efforts. [footnote 6: Most government funding of the NII to date has supported R&D rather than operations. The notable exception is the funding for the telecommunications backbone funded through the NSF which connects the regionals. Government R&D and operational programs of note are: Research and Development. - High Performance Computing and Communications Research and Development. The Federal High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program provides funding for research in library and information science and systems required to advance the development of digital libraries. NSF, ARPA, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and others participating in the HPCC Program are funding a variety of projects to support the creation of digital libraries and advance the technology base available to operate digital libraries. Under a new program component, Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications, ARPA funds the development of hypermedia systems with intelligent human interfaces; NSF funds digital libraries research; NASA is developing prototype digital libraries and advanced methods for accessing their data; the National Institutes of Health are developing advanced medical data base technology; the National Security Agency supports research in mass storage and database management; and the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are expanding access to environmental data. - Research on Digital Libraries. HPCC R&D includes cooperative initiatives, combining agency funds and efforts. A recent endeavor of importance to libraries is the Research on Digital Libraries Initiative, a joint effort of NSF, ARPA, and NASA. This initiative provides grants for research on systems for data capture, software for searching, filtering, and summarizing large volumes of data in various formats, and networking protocols and standards that can accommodate the high volume and bandwidth requirements of digital libraries. - Other. R&D projects such as the Digital Technical Reports Library project involving ARPA and other players, and the NSF Digital Library Initiative, have emphasized the manipulation of large data collections, including models for policy and technology tools necessary to make large amounts of data available. The use of sophisticated text retrieval techniques, including statistical and semantic analysis, continues to be explored through activities such as the Tipster project and the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), both sponsored by ARPA. ARPA also is providing support for the CS-TR (Computer Science Technical Reports) R&D project. This is an effort to share university-generated computer science literature in a linked digital library among the participants (MIT, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, and Stanford). The overall project is coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). Operational Efforts. The GPO Access Act of 1993 encourages electronic availability of federal information. The NTIA Grants is intended to stimulate the building of the infrastructure. Due to demand and perceived value, some agencies are striving to make use of the Internet to make data available electronically. Some federal data bases are only available through private sector vendors, and several of the most important of these are candidates for low-cost distribution to the public (for example, the Security and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database). Several dozen federal agencies already provide points for distribution of publications and other agency-generated information on the Internet. Other efforts include the management and distribution of copyright information pilot and federal preservation and archiving projects. - GPO Access. The Government Printing Office "Access" Act, which became public law in June 1993, requires the Superintendent of Documents to maintain an electronic directory of federal electronic information; provide a system of online access to the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, and other appropriate publications; and operate an electronic storage facility for federal electronic information. These services are to be operational by June 1994. Depository libraries are to have free access to the services while others will pay a fee to cover the incremental cost of dissemination. The law also requires the Superintendent of Documents to accommodate, to the extent practical, agency requests to include their information in the GPO online access system. - NTIA. P.L. 103-121, appropriating FY 1994 funds for the Departments of Commerce, Justice, State, the Judiciary, and related agencies, includes $26 million requested by the Administration to begin an information infrastructure grants program to support demonstrations of new telecommunications technology applications. Libraries are among the institutions eligible to receive matching grants under this program to expand telecommunications networks and to access existing and new sources of electronic information. - Federal Information Online. Use of electronic bulletin boards systems (BBS) and online databases has grown rapidly within the government over the past decade. More than 40 organizations within the federal government operate BBS as part of their information dissemination activities. These BBS can be accessed directly through a modem, and, in some cases, through the Internet. The Fedworld BBS, operated by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), provides easy access to a plethora of government information sites, including digital libraries, more than 130 other federal BBS, and digital documents such as Presidential speeches and health care legislation. The White House routinely posts the text of speeches, press briefings, press releases, reports, and legislative proposals to various bulletin board systems, including some available through consumer-oriented services like Compuserve and America On-line. A few members of Congress have begun posting the text of their speeches and press releases to publicly accessible bulletin board systems; one member has setup a Gopher server. Several dozen federal agencies provide Internet distribution of publications and other agency-generated information through public Gopher, World-Wide Web (WWW), Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), and other servers or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. - Publishing and Data Creation. More than 50 separate organizations within the federal government were listed as database producers in a 1992 directory of online databases. Among the 175 publicly available federal databases, perhaps the best known are the National Library of Medicine's MEDLARS system, the National Agricultural Library's AGRICOLA system, the Library of Congress information system LOCIS, and the Federal Election Commission's Direct Access system. - Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS). ARPA, the Library of Congress, and CNRI are collaborating on the development of an experimental Electronic Copyright Management System to explore the use of high-performance computing systems and networks, tools, and procedures to manage copyright information and other intellectual property and associated rights in a network environment. This system will serve as a testbed for the evaluation of the concepts and issues of electronic copyright deposit, registration, and recordation of transfers of ownership and licensing transactions. This development effort is an interagency effort involving agencies from both the executive and legislative branches. - Archival and Digitization Projects. The United States National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) continues to evolve mechanisms for management of digital archives. NARA's Center for Electronic Records appraises, collects, preserves, and provides access to U.S. federal records in electronic format. The Center maintains electronic records created by the U.S. Congress, the courts, the Executive Office of the President, Presidential commissions, and nearly 100 bureaus, departments, and other components of executive branch agencies and their contractors. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is developing the capacity to acquire, store, and distribute large collections of digital images, including digital pages created as part of the System for Automated Interlibrary Loan (SAIL), diagnostic radiology images used by the Diagnostic X-ray Prototype Network (DXPnet) project, and the 2-D and 3-D anatomic images acquired as part of the Visible Human Project. Other federal agencies actively exploring efforts to convert traditional-media material to electronic form to improve access and preservation include the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress (American Memory project). Non-Government Applications R&D and pilot projects are being undertaken by many non-federal government organizations representing both commercial and non-commercial entities interested in participating in the NII. These efforts are vital both for the continued development of the infrastructure and for the establishment of roles and policy in the electronic environment. Publishers. There are currently a number of experimental projects under way to use networks to deliver documents or provide access to images of print publications. These include services offered by Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL), Engineering Index (EI), University Microfilms International (UMI), and Faxon of ten in partnerships with secondary database access providers such as the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), the Research Libraries Group (RLG), or Dialog. EI, UMI, AT&T (InterNIC), Faxon, Elsevier, and Springer-Verlag are also undertaking projects to develop the infrastructure for digital publication and conversion, navigation and retrieval, and interoperability standards. Several scientific journal publishers such as Elsevier and Springer-Verlag are conducting experiments with universities to make the contents of certain journals available electronically to the university either under site licenses or pay-per-view agreements. Third-party aggregators and relicensers such as UMI and Information Access Corporation are licensing full-text or journal-page images for specific areas directly to institutions. A number of publishers are making the text of their publications available for searching through database access providers such as Dialog or BRS on a transactional basis. Journals published only in electronic form are well established and growing in number. Most are free; only a few are refereed and those constitute a minor force in the academic tenure process. The growing number of respected free electronic journals and newsletters include Psycoloquy, Public Access Computer Systems Review, and the Library of Congress Cataloging Newsline. Some subscription journals have begun to be published electronically. These include OCLC/AAAS (Online Computer Library Center/American Association for the Advancement of Science) Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, which is peer-reviewed, and John Quarterman's Matrix News, published both electronically and in print. Copyright issues relating to electronic journals still need to be resolved. In the sciences, distinguished print journals are now or soon will be published in digital as well as print form. Mathematical Reviews and the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society are available in electronic and print form. Plans have been announced to publish digital forms of both the Physical Review Letters and the Astro physical Journal Letters. The same is true of several popular magazines (i.e., Mother Jones, Wired). Academic and Research. Academic and research institutions and professional associations have also pioneered digital library or infrastructure building projects, with spectacular success in forcing the expansion of the Internet and related electronic mail services, and are becoming increasingly influential in the areas of navigational software development and retrieval applications. All but one of the most common navigational tools on the Internet was developed at research or academic organizations (Gopher, Archie, WWW, and Mosaic; the original WAIS implementation was developed by commercial organizations). Academic institutions are also at the forefront of diverse and active electronic publishing ventures, facilitated both by the LIST SERV software, and increasingly by Gopher and WWW. [footnote 7: Gopher is used extensively for Campus-Wide Information Systems and is widely implemented in academic and government communities. The hypertext-based WWW is being implemented along with Mosaic software for searching mixed-format data. WAIS is widely used for text indexing and searching on the Internet. The Internet LISTSERV software is used extensively for email forums.] Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota. WAIS was developed cooperatively by Thinking Machines Co., Apple Computer, Dow Jones & Co., and KPMG Peat Marwick. WWW was originally developed by CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory) and is currently being implemented along with Mosaic, an interface developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) facility at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The Internet LISTSERV software was developed by Anastasios Kotsikonas at the University of Boston. Other academia-private sector cooperative ventures are the University of Massachusetts (at Amherst) Inquery and Tipster projects, funded with NSF and other federal money, and developed in collaboration with several major commercial publishing partners. Another tool of interest that is being developed by public and private funds is the Knowbot Information Service (KIS). KIS is designed to act as a personal digital assistant to locate, evaluate, and retrieve information based on the user's requirements and other constraints (such as the willingness to pay for information). Elsewhere software vendors and database publishers are making important strides in the development of powerful retrieval engines (e.g., Oracle's ConTEXT). Community. Community projects of interest include the Blacksburg, Virginia Electronic Village (BEV), the San Francisco Public Library Community Electronic Information Infrastructure (SFPL/CEII), and NYSERNet's Project GAIN (Global Access Information Network). Community-focused projects tend to produce a model where library services have an integral (but not necessarily a central) role in a large set of information delivery and communication tools and services. These projects are typically intended to promote interactivity among members of the communities. The BEV project is a collaborative effort between the town of Blacksburg, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and C&P Telephone to create a network of high-capacity data communications and services with the objective of linking members of the community with each other and with the Internet. Information available through BEV currently includes electronic mail and access to local and Internet resources. Potentially, all residents of Blacksburg will be able to connect to BEV from their homes. The SFPL/CEII initiative, is another ambitious community project that is still in the planning phase. This project focuses on the use of world-wide resources to support the information needs of a specific community, in this case San Francisco. The NYSERNet GAIN project extended Internet access and training to five rural New York State public libraries and one Indian national school. The project clearly demonstrated that public librarians in a very rural setting with limited resources...could in fact get connected to the Internet, use a broad range of equipment and electronic services, develop new types of services to the community, and create a sense of excitement that came out of the library. Their sense of excitement and discovery translated into programs and applications that often put the public library at the foreground of technology application in the entire community [McClure et al, 40]. Standards Standards-setting Groups. Several major groups are developing standards for the information technology, electronic information, and computer networking components of the NII. The groups are the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and its U.S. counterpart, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI); the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), an ANSI-accredited standards developing body serving the publishing, library, and information services communities; the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which develops and coordinates standards for the federal government and leads U.S. standards development generally; ad-hoc standards groups, which usually focus on a single problem such as UNICODE or the Open Software Foundation (OSF); the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an informal standards making group that generates Internet standards; and the Internet Society which is responsible for the Internet standards process. A newly formed group known as the Cross-Industry Working Team is striving to create a consensus view of the required standards. Data Description. Standards are needed for the description of data. Tangible, traditional library materials are physically described, classified, and given a physical location code. In the past all these operations have been carried out by libraries. When retrieval is necessary, access is gained by looking up an item's classification number indicating where the physical item is located and where it may be retrieved. Currently, the extension to the USMARC (U.S. Machine Readable Cataloging) record for data description is a stable standard which can be used for electronic items. In digital libraries both the access scheme and the retrieval needs have changed. To access an electronic item, additional information may be required, including information about the medium or system requirements (such as in the case of a computer program). A standard for this description must be implemented. ANSI/ISO and the IETF are currently working on such standards. While a formal standard for information description is highly desirable, the cost, the slowness of the process, and the demands and politics of the international networking arena make this a difficult area. With the transition to electronic material, the need for such manual descriptive techniques may be supplanted by electronic methods for abstracting, indexing, or otherwise capturing the high-level descriptive information necessary for efficient access. Computer-to-Computer Communications. One standard that is stable, and that has the potential to be of use initially, is the ANSI/NISO Z39.50 standard for system-to-system communications for retrieval. The ARPA CS-TR project is exploring new approaches for computer-to-computer communications that go beyond the existing Z39.50 standard. Cryptography, Security, and Privacy. Cryptographic technology, essential to ensuring electronic information integrity, must exist before large information providers will participate in the network. Standards for cryptography will only be developed in a policy framework that does not impede their development. The issues of intellectual property and export controls on cryptographic technologies must be resolved before proposals in this area are internationally accepted and implemented. Crude measures such as restriction by password and network address are common ways to provide security for access to restricted information today. Measures for providing privacy to information seekers need to be defined, implemented, and made widely available. Other Standards. Other standards which must be agreed upon are ones for exchanging and interpreting networked materials formats, and for assuring security of operations and information. There are multiple standards for sound, while standards for images are in their infancy. Some progress has been made in the area of transmitting documents in specific formats. For text, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is frequently proposed for use as a document content standard for non-structured text. Standards mentioned for exchanging structured data include ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One), which is used in library applications, and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). Several of the Internet navigation and retrieval tools discussed earlier have become de facto standards in a relatively brief period of time. These include Gopher, WAIS, and WWW. Private industry also is actively developing tools that may provide meta-standards (standards for the conversion of diverse ad hoc standards to a common form), such as Adobe's Acrobat and Common Ground software for the presentation of formatted text and other data. These examples (not exhaustive) are illustrative of an extremely volatile, complex, active, and sometimes competitive mix of parties involved in building the portions of the NII of concern to libraries. PART III: Where Do We Want to Be? NII Long-Term Goals and the Libraries The long term goal of the NII is a world of ubiquitous information. The realization of this vision for libraries depends on the reliability and universal accessibility of the information infrastructure. Society must not only have the ability to support projects to gather and control electronic information but must also underwrite funding to assure basic access. The realization of this vision is dependent on technological advances and policy that will allow all of the interested entities to work together within a single network and policy framework, whether corporate, library, government, research, or entertainment. Achieving this long-term goal requires that commercial providers of information, libraries, and user communities discuss, explore, and develop a new paradigm for their roles in the evolving electronic community. Copyright, funding, standards, and privacy and security issues must be addressed in both the short and long runs.S Short-Term Goals Copyright. It is obvious that we are at the beginning of an enormous revolution in communications. The copyright law is at the center of this revolution and will determine the course it takes. The bulk of electronic material will be copyrighted, as is the bulk of published material today. The issue of the protection of copyrighted material must be addressed (effective and administratively feasible licensing systems will be the key). For now, there is a standoff. Copyright owners (publishers, information providers, authors), librarians, and others with interests in this area must come together to model agreements covering on-premise online access, transmission to the public, downloading and reprinting, and feasible payment mechanisms. Funding. Library budgets have not kept pace with the costs of materials. As the prices for serials, monographs, and other materials have soared, library budgets have declined. [footnote 8: See Mellon Foundation Study. For the 24 public and private universities libraries included in the study, library budgets and expenditures as a percent of educational and general expenditures had declined from a high in 1974 of 4.05 percent to a low in 1990 of 3.20 percent [Cummings, 192].] If libraries are to participate in the NII, funding is required to support all aspects of their electronic evolution. Funding to continue current operations is basic. To become digital libraries, funding is required to purchase and install equipment, provide connectivity, digitize core materials, and educate both the staff and the user communities. Standards. The provision for international standards for interoperability, data description and storage, navigation and retrieval, authentication of retrieved material, cryptography, privacy, security, and preservation are essential before information providers will offer their data over networks or users will accept the network as the central provider of their information needs. PART IV: How Are We Going to Get There? Today's libraries, facing the challenges of developing improved electronic capabilities and addressing standardization and privacy issues, can work toward making a reality of the long-term NII vision and strengthen libraries' roles as information purveyors by working incrementally on a number of fronts. The government has a leading role in supporting many of these efforts, among them new applications of copyright regulations and law to deal with the emerging digital world; privacy protection; research and development in digital libraries; support for demonstration projects; education, training, retraining for those who will staff digital libraries; and ensured access to government information. Some of these government activities are outlined below. The Government's Role Funding of Operations. Governments currently support libraries at the state, local, and federal levels. While the costs of acquiring materials and administering collections have continued to rise during the past 20 years, library budgets have shrunk. Funding, therefore, is vital if libraries are to develop comprehensive electronic capabilities while continuing to offer existing services. Funding is needed to ensure the existence of equipment, connectivity, and education at the local level. This is particularly true of K-12 schools and public libraries. Many school and public libraries currently lack network access and knowledge of how to use the technology once access is achieved. Funding is also needed for prototype projects to explore the roles and relationships of libraries to the commercial and scholarly communities. Facilitation of Standards Development. The government can play a leadership role by working closely with standards-setting groups to define standards and to clarify and expedite the standards-setting process. The federal government, with its need for broad government-wide consensus on the use of de facto as well as formal or de jure standards, is in a key position to help establish consensus on key standards. The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) group has made progress in this area by identifying and promoting the use of interoperability standards where they exist. For the progress made by GILS to be extended and utilized, government dissemination of information efforts must be coordinated with standards-setting efforts. Providing a Testbed: Federal Information. The tremendous information output of the federal government is an ideal testing ground for the development of information retrieval and delivery because of its vast quantity and broad utility and interest, and because it is nearly all in the public domain. Providing a Test Group: Depository Library Program. [footnote 9: The Depository Library Program (DLP) is a national resource network designed to ensure free public access to all government produced and published information. Depository libraries are located in each state and congressional district to assure wide distribution of these documents. This commitment to public access to government information can be traced back to 1857 when it was resolved that printed documents should be made available to the public through official sources. The Depository Library Act of 1962 established the network of Regional Libraries and increased the potential number of depository libraries.] Since 1983, the Joint Committee on Printing, the Ad Hoc Committee on Depository Library Access to Federal Automated Data Bases, and GPO have initiated projects to assess the viability of depository distribution of federal publications or products in electronic form. An analysis of the projects concluded that, "The primary implication of the pilot projects is that input from depository libraries is essential from the ground level in future planning efforts if electronic products are to succeed in depository libraries" [Aldrich and Jobe as quoted in Hernon and McClure, 73]. This group of 1,400 libraries is an ideal subset of libraries for a variety of test projects. Policy Setting: Copyright. Resolution of the complex but important copyright issues will stimulate the growth of the national information infrastructure, including digital libraries. Copyright law encourages both creativity and the open dissemination of the products of creativity. The benefits which accrue to authors under U.S. Copyright law have spurred the U.S. to become the largest creator and exporter of copyright material in the world. From an NII or digital library perspective, the major issue is how to encourage copyright owners to make electronic material widely available under terms and conditions that are not administratively burdensome or unduly expensive. Related significant challenges are to develop guidelines which set forth permitted uses of digital information under the "fair use" exemptions to the Copyright Code (Section 107) and appropriate downloading or reproduction of digital information under Section 108 by libraries and archives. - Dissemination Issues. Publishers and other information providers are currently addressing many of the issues involved in electronic dissemination of their products and new bases for compensation. Today the answer to the acquisition and use of most electronic mate rials is individual contracts with publishers or other copyright owners. However, it is impossible for any library to negotiate thousands of contracts, and publishers will not want to do this either. Unfortunately, the results of efforts to standardize contracts, e.g., the Coalition for Net worked Information's READI project, have been discouraging. Therefore, the possibilities of an information broker, a clearinghouse, or a collective rights organization for permissions and payments become attractive. Any system must be flexible enough to allow copyright owners to control rates and other conditions of access. Model contracts or blanket or site licenses must be considered. Additionally, the critical issue of fair use in a digital environment must be addressed. The development of guidelines to set forth permitted uses under the fair use section of the copyright law would be extremely useful; such a task, however, is formidable. Current Material. For libraries, the issues are different for retrospective and current materials. With government encouragement and support, publishers, information providers, and librarians should be able to work together to develop effective and efficient mechanisms to safeguard the rights of copyrighted digital materials. There are already projects under way that are addressing this problem. One of these projects is the Electronic Copyright Management System sponsored by the LOC Copyright Office and Information Technology Services, ARPA, and CNRI. The system will provide mechanisms for electronic copyright deposit, registration, and recordation of transfers of copyright ownership as well as licensing transactions of works owned in a network environment. Material. For older materials, different solutions may be necessary. Here, copyright owners are difficult to find, and, indeed, the copyright status of works may be difficult to determine. For a library to convert materials to machine-readable form and make such works available digitally requires permission to reproduce and distribute them. Creative solutions must be developed that do not disadvantage authors and copyright owners. Definition Issues. There are other difficult issues that must be explored. Only copy rightable expression is protected. Ideas, methods, systems, facts and the like are not. Works with expired copyright terms are free for all to use. Copyright terms vary from country to country; the Internet is increasingly international, and the NII will have international linkages. A national plan must consider the international implications. A number of questions will arise in a networked and digital environment: (1) How is "a work" defined? (2) How is authorship defined? (3) What about subsequent contributions when the author's contribution is similar to what is considered an adaptation? (4) What constitutes public communication or performance? and (5) How should the rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and the making of derivative works be adapted to digital technology and networking? Groups Addressing the Issues. The Intellectual Property Working Group of the Information Policy Committee of the Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) is directly addressing these and other issues. Others working on these issues are: the Coalition for Networked Information; the Copyright Clearance Center; Ted Nelson in his Xanadu project; the Information Industries Association with its "Digital Library" issues paper written by Joseph Ebersole; Gary Griswold of InfoLogic Software, Inc., with his proposal for a copyright tracking mechanism; Peter S. Graham, Librarian at Rutgers; and Carnegie Mellon's Information Networking Institute project for an Internet Billing Server prototype. The Library of Congress through its Digital Library Coordinating Committee also is addressing this area. Industry Regulation (Cable, TV, Telecommunications). Key industries are currently making and implementing plans to move into the world of electronic information. Among them are the cable companies, the seven regional Bell companies, and various entertainment companies. All have pieces of the electronic infrastructure -- cabling, a user base, or digitized data -- upon which to build major information-providing businesses. These companies are undertaking mergers and acquisitions to supplement their areas of strength for the information industry they see evolving. Deregulation without safeguards could lead to the formation of oligopolies with price structures that effectively preclude the use of major amounts of timely information by the average citizen. The federal government has an imminent and critical role in determining that affordable access by the public is assured. Education.[footnote 10: See study done by D'Elia et al (funded by the Department of Education). The survey consisted of a sample (1,001) of the general public who were asked to evaluate ten roles of the public library (the ten categories included libraries' roles in the community, education, recreation, and as information provider), using four response categories ranging from "not important" through "very important." The three roles ranked most important were educational support center for students of all ages (88 percent); a learning center for adult independent learners (85 percent); a discovery and learning center for preschool children (83 percent).] The federal government plays a key role in the nation's education infrastructure, and the priority, direction, and support it provides to educational institutions at national, regional, and local levels will be critical to the ability of these institutions to gain meaningful access to the NII. Important opportunities exist for the development of network connectivity in schools, and for the promotion of distance learning and other extensions of educational opportunities across age, economic, and geographic barriers. Early steps in this direction could include a program of grants to extend at least primitive access to the NII to virtually every school, and to support a broad program of distance learning curriculum development and teacher and librarian, particularly those who staff public and K-12 libraries, training drawing on the resources of the NII. Once consistent connectivity exists for educational institutions, the foundation will have been laid for sharing the resources of digital libraries with students and educators. This means that libraries will continue to fulfill their traditional role as adjuncts to education. Opportunities in the Coming Year The most important opportunities in 1994 for the application of the NII to libraries may be the confrontation of copyright issues and policies, and the need to monitor and respond appropriately to the shifts taking place in the telecommunications and cable industries. All legislation that is passed in support of NII and NII-library programs is obviously of major importance. The Transition of Libraries to the NII There is great divergence between current library services, technology, and funding on the one hand and the vision of the NII for digital libraries on the other. There will, of necessity, be a transition period in which libraries continue to acquire, organize, collect, and preserve traditional materials in specific geographic sites, and continue to receive funding in much the same ways that they do currently. The NII envisions "universal access," yet the infrastructure is incomplete. Work to be done includes everything from the fiber optic cabling to installing modems at the local public library, to the creation of software to make the navigation of diverse systems on diverse platforms easy, and the creation of standards to make it all work. It is unlikely that acquisitions will become fully electronic on a large scale -- meaning that an information item can be ordered and delivered electronically -- until issues concerning the roles and rights of authors, publishers, libraries, and users are clarified. Some type of descriptive record, such as the descriptive and subject record currently created by catalogers, will continue to be required for efficient searching and retrieval until hardware and software can create the abstract data for accurate searching of massive text files; or until libraries' hardware and software platforms are so powerful that searching massive amounts of textual and image data no longer presents a constraint. Other components which must be addressed during the transition in order to fulfill the vision of the NII is the conversion of existing non-digital data and the assurance of access to and preservation of data in digital form. Due to the amount of material to be considered for digitization (500+ years of printed material, 150 years of photographs, 100 years of movies) and the number of problems associated with conversion (the lack of image standards, selection and organization practices for digital materials, the expense of the process, the strategic problem of mutilating an item in order to digitize it easily, copyright issues), building an efficient model for the digitization of analog must be considered early in the transition. Similarly, material created and only existing in digital form is not being archived or preserved in an orderly fashion. The issues of collecting digital items with a view to long-term archiving and preservation, particularly those without broad market appeal, are of little interest to entities interested in immediate economic reward. Archiving and preserving for posterity are largely being ignored at this time. Methods to assure the preservation of material of value to succeeding generations must be created. In times of transition, sufficient funding to continue current operations while converting to and adopting new operations is critical. The libraries that make up the U.S. library community are funded through diverse and uncoordinated sources. Public libraries depend on local budgets; research libraries depend on their respective institution for their funding; government agency libraries are part of the federal budget; repositories depend on endowments and donations for funding. In times of economic restraint, such as today, funds to educational institutions, of which libraries often are a part, are among the first to be cut. If libraries are to continue to perform the services currently provided and, at the same time, adopt technology that will make their participation in the NII a possibility, then a national plan to coordinate and supplement both the required efforts and funding is essential. After the Transition: Digital Libraries The transition to an information age will continue to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The need for physical access will decrease and demand for network-based access to information will increase. The evolution will occur for a variety of reasons: increasing demand for timely information; increasing costs of traditional material; lower costs and faster and cheaper networks which make digital knowledge networks feasible. Not the least of the reasons for the evolution will be a preference for access to material that is easily searched and manipulated. The national digital library will be geographically distributed. It will consist of a network of publishers, vendors, libraries, other organizations, and individuals, public, commercial, and private, any of which can offer an item or collections of items. Digital libraries will allow users access to knowledge worldwide. Similarly, digital libraries will make their own databases available to users of the worldwide network. At the same time, it will provide programs and services that will build a sense of community and meet the needs for access to information and knowledge for that community [Dowlin]. Digital libraries collectively will strive to contain all past and future knowledge in electronic form. In the United States, public libraries will try to assure that digital information is made available to all either for free or at a reasonable cost. Policy makers will have to resolve the copyright licensing issues as well as the issue of fair use in the electronic world to the satisfaction of authors and publishers, and to the continuing benefit of the public. The role of librarians could evolve from electronic archivist to knowledge navigator of the network of data which is the library. Librarians will continue to acquire, organize, preserve, and make available information, but they also will be required to function as managers of electronic information. This role may require librarians to participate in all aspects of the knowledge chain, from advising authors on outlets, to placing digital material under control, to organizing data for ease of access, to instructing and guiding users. Issues and Questions to be Addressed Copyright The advanced information infrastructure presents three significant and qualitatively new challenges to protecting intellectual property. First, digitization offers an unprecedented, easy, and inexpensive method to produce an indefinite number of perfect copies. Second, information in disparate media can be converted into a single digital stream and can be easily manipulated to create a variety of new works. Third, digitized information can be instantaneously distributed to and downloaded by thousands of users of the network. If the NII environment is to prosper as expected, then contributions to it must flow from all sources: commercial, private, public, and government. If the information provided by these sources is to be valuable, creativity must continue to be remunerated. Since the issues of intellectual property rights are critical to further development of the NII, how should the federal government work together with representative members of the information community to provide leadership to clarify the existing intellectual property laws [footnote 11: Copyright in the United States is established by the Constitution and confirmed by statute. Its original purpose was to encourage intellectual productivity by securing intellectual property rights for authors while promoting fair public access to their output. Only expression is protected; the manner is which the expression is packaged is not.] as they relate to electronic information in the networked environment? Should this include a review of the appropriateness of the current public policy objective of the copyright law -- the attempt to strike a balance between copyright rights holders and the public good? How should the federal government help create an intellectual property rights model for the network environment? How should such models contribute to future collections of material in digital form? Any new models must continue to encourage creativity while addressing the public and research communities' continued and legitimate information needs. Authors, publishers, scholars, librarians, information technology and service providers, the Copyright Office, and the public all must be represented in any modeling and decision-making efforts. Consideration must be given to the impact that the recommendations of the Intellectual Property Working Group of the Information Policy Committee of the NII will have. What kind of pilot projects are appropriate to explore issues, establish precedents, clarify roles, and identify standards, policies, and models for fair use and protection of rights in the digital environment? Such projects should include exploring prototypes that protect the rights of copyright owners while at the same time allowing use of material in research and public libraries (i.e., browsing, research by one or a small set of users for the advancement of knowledge). The Electronic Copyright Management System pilot currently being developed by ARPA, CNRI, and LOC will provide an electronic means for handling the deposit, registration, and recording of copyright ownership as well as licensing transactions of works already owned. This project can begin the process of building future digital collections and serve as a model for non-participating publishers. Once it is operational the challenge will be how to expand it to include more partners. Equity of Access and Education The specter of information "have-nots" in the midst of the wealth of NII information must be averted. Access and education are two key ways to increase the probability that the number of the information "have-nots" will be reduced. What should the federal government's role in reducing the potential for information "have-nots" be and how can it achieve the vision of universal access? How should the federal government fund programs for public gateways and for the education of librarians in the new technology. What institutions will act as gateways for those not having access or technical knowledge sufficient to make use of the NII? Isn't this the emerging role of libraries? What funding should be extended, refocused, initiated to stimulate connectivity for gateway institutions such as libraries? What role will the federal government play in funding the education of the NII knowledge organizer-navigator? Isn't this the emerging role of librarians in the NII? Who will be trained to be the knowledge organizer and navigator of the NII databases? Providing access and strengthening the technical position of libraries offers a strong possibility for providing equitable access. One means of doing this is to extend and re-focus the Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA) through FY 1998 to explicitly encourage libraries, particularly public and depository, to become public gateways to the National Information Infrastructure. LSCA-funded gateways could begin to provide for universal access to the national digital library's information. Is it appropriate to substitute funding for the purchase of necessary computer and network hardware and software and training of staff by public and depository libraries for the current LSCA funding authority for public library construction? The LSCA currently is set to expire at the end of FY 1994. The Administration's FY 1995 budget request proposes to continue at level funding the largest LSCA program for improvement of public library services. President Clinton's proposal in the State of the Union address to extend the NII to every school and library is partially addressed in the proposed budget by continued funding of the LSCA program for interlibrary cooperation. Although level funding is requested for this program, the "requested level would enable the States to expand their networking capabilities and library participation in development of the National Information Infrastructure." What means are there to provide funds for librarians so that they are prepared for the technological challenges of advanced networks and search tools and also able to undertake digitization of unique resources in academic and research libraries? Funding to provide broader access and to strengthen the technical position of public, depository, and academic libraries offers the possibility of providing equitable access for all. Education of the leaders in the library community could strengthen the technological knowledge of librarians so that they are able to employ the technology optimally and train others to do the same. Digital Conversion Much of the concern of the National Information Infrastructure has been with connectivity and access. There is an increasing need to focus on content, as reflected by the Committee on Applications and Technology (CAT) mandate. While discussions of digital initiatives are generally broad and imply the existence of digitized data through the conversion of existing holdings in major libraries, the issues surrounding the digitization of these holdings are frequently avoided. Who is going to do the digitizing? Should this be undertaken by a single institution or by multiple institutions? What institution(s) have the holdings and the expertise to initiate significant pilot projects in this area? What comprises a significant set of material worthy of the funding of such major projects? How should the federal government fund these initiatives? It is clear that market forces are unlikely to produce the resources required to initiate this effort on a meaningful scale. However, are there private entities that could help supplement federally initiated digitization projects? One set of materials that should be [footnote 12: The Library's Americana holdings are much greater than the estimated 1 million items contained in these 200 collections. The Library's Americana holdings are estimated to be closer to 40,000,000. These 200 collections are those that have been identified as important to the culture of the United States and for which copyright protection either no longer exists because the materials are in the public domain or permission for use is a reasonable certainty.] is held by the Library of Congress. This material consists of more than 200 collections that represent the American cultural heritage. These collections contain more than one million items: books, manuscripts, microfilm, photographs, recorded sound, music, and maps. The suggestion that the Library's Americana collections be considered for digitization is based on the collections' reflection of the nation's heritage, the broad public interest in the material, and their specific value to education. The digitization of these collections presents a less significant problem than many others would in that the materials are either no longer subject to copyright or permissions for re-publication have already been granted. It is also attractive for a project of this magnitude to be broached initially by a single institution. Such a project could serve to establish a model which could then be expanded to other libraries holding important Americana materials. The objective would be to create a networked set of distributed, network-accessible databases on the American experience for education within this decade. In the long run, creation and implementation of appropriate intellectual property protection models will permit the future collection of material in digital form. This, however, will not address the rich heritage of material that exists now in libraries and which will never be accessible over the network unless digitized. It is essential that some of the legislation under consideration, as well as some of the budget proposals being drafted, address digitization. Federal Investment in R&D Which areas to be considered for research have the potential to contribute the most rapid development and orderly growth of digital libraries as part of the NII? What searching aids could be designed for the short term? for the long term? What basic architectural components of the digital library are in place? Which are missing? What issues must be resolved before the public will be willing to depend on the network in the same ways it trusts traditional libraries and the voice network? What are the models for preservation in the NII, both for material that only exists in digital form and material that exists in other forms that are endangered? Who will provide a testbed for digital repositories? What should be included in this testbed? How should the federal government deploy its funding support to focus the necessary research efforts on the following areas: - Schemes for classification and the building of lexicons and thesauruses are vital. Given the magnitude of data that will be searchable in the electronic environment, more efficient searching mechanisms must be built. Broader, more orderly, and more up-to-date classifications are one way to do this. Similarly, well-designed electronic lexicons and thesauruses can reduce the number of search query iterations and improve the precision of the response without excessive user intervention. - The basic architecture to guide the implementation of library systems is needed. Many components are already in place: processing, storage, networking, authoring tools, and intellectual property law. Components missing from this architecture are: full technological interoperability; mechanisms to determine availability and ownership of items; a means to electronically receive permission for use. - "Smarter" tools are needed. Currently, the amount of information retrieved from the network (directly and precisely related to the topic) is highly correlated with the expertise of the user searching the network. - The issues of privacy and security must be resolved before the public will be willing to trust the network. - Models for preservation, both for material that only exists in digital form and material that exists in other forms that are endangered, are currently lacking. - Finally, testbeds for digital repositories must be established. Any testbed must provide: acceptance of digital items; authentication of the item and its source; the ability to interface the item(s) with other systems as required (for example, copyright management); a means to authenticate and respond to requests to identify or provide access to stored items; the ability to provide a multimedia response; a means to impose conditions on the use of an item; and on going management of all stored items. Coordination and Review of Standards Better coordination of standards-setting groups should be initiated so that standards on internet working, interoperability, and security are created and adopted in a more timely way. In a dynamic and quickly changing environment such as the Internet and the future NII, standards groups must consider streamlining the process for setting de jure standards and creating a process to adopt de facto standards when they are useful. How can the federal government most effectively participate in the setting of appropriate standards for libraries? Any national efforts to review standards-setting groups and methods should be undertaken with a clear sense that the network is already an international entity and that its international component is likely to grow as quickly (or quicker) than the national entity. Conclusions Libraries are central to the success of the NII. Librarians have already begun to explore the challenges presented by electronic materials and navigation tools. Enhanced skills, roles, and alliances in the electronic environment must be explored and developed before the vision of NII digital libraries becomes a reality. Libraries and librarians are anxious to assume their place in this electronic world, but basic issues must be addressed. These issues include copyright licensing schemes, collective rights administration and guidelines for fair use in an electronic environment, the availability of sufficient resources to ensure reliable connectivity and staff knowledge in network use, and databases of sufficient quality and quantity to be useful to those in need of reliable information. While the growth of the Internet has been impressive, the NII is a much more comprehensive, ambitious initiative which necessitates resolving significant issues and meeting critical objectives for Libraries as well as other application areas. 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