Herausforderungen für die Hochschulen und ihre Informations- und Kommunikationseinrichtungen
15/16 September 1997;
Universität Göttingen
Derek Law
The organisation and funding of higher education in the United Kingdom is rather more
complicated than is generally supposed. Although the majority of funding comes from England,
the separate ministries for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales all have Funding Councils,
agencies that allow government to operate at arms length from the universities. Each Funding
Council has its own secretariat and a separate council with a mixture of lay members and
university staff. Although less complicated than the structure of Länder in Germany, it is far
from a unitary system and requires skilful management to allow joint national (UK level)
activities to be agreed. The four funding agencies have created several joint committees to
undertake joint activities, of which one, the Joint Information Systems Committee
The total expenditure on higher education from all sources is approximately ten billion pounds
sterling each year. The budget available to the Joint Information Systems Committee and for
related electronic library projects is about forty million pounds per annum. This budget is created
by "top-slicing" the sum from the allocations of the government departments, before the funding
councils distribute it to the universities. Roughly half of this is spent on the network itself,
JANET and the rest on electronic library content. Or to calculate this another way, only four
one-thousandth of one per cent of higher education expenditure has been used for the
development of the electronic library in the UK.
The first national deal for electronic data is now six years old and was for the citation indices of the
Institute for Scientific Information. This first and still flagship deal continues to see ever increasing growth
in usage. This was followed by a range of essentially bibliographic products ranging from Beilstein’s
Crossfire service to the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences. These deals were negotiated by
CHEST and allowed the Higher Education community to use its purchasing power collectively to persuade
publishers that co-operative subscription based contracts were a better model than transaction based
contracts. Although all universities contribute towards the costs of each dataset to which they subscribe,
this has allowed us both to reach a larger set of universities than would have installed the services
individually and, perhaps more importantly, to attempt the provision of standard interfaces.
The data is provided from five national data centres selected competitively from amongst the universities.
There are several reasons for this, which collectively form a national policy. Firstly, distribution of data
over a limited number of centres allows some concentration of investment and some management of traffic
flows on the network. Secondly, this allows us to concentrate human resources and skills in areas as varied
as the management of very large datasets and the design of interfaces. Thirdly, we have found that
publishers prefer dealing with what they see as a group of professional dataset suppliers. Fourthly, we are
reluctant to rely entirely on North America as a data source and wish to see a strong European information
industry. We therefore see national value in having a trained cadre of workers with relevant skills.
As well as purchasing data we have recently set up a national digitisation centre at the University of
Hertfordshire. In part this subsidises data creation and in part it will explore the economics of digitisation
and look at relevant standards issues. It is expected to concentrate on the digitisation of out of copyright
material or on partnership deals with publishers, rather like the JSTOR project in the United States. This
emphasises part of the philosophy, which wishes to see the creation of a critical mass of data in academic
subjects, thus ensuring that digitised collections become an unremarkable part of everyday teaching and
research rather than being exceptional "toys".
We have been concerned that all disciplines should benefit from electronic libraries and so a significant
programme has been created to support special library collections in the humanities. Although much of this
has gone for the cataloguing of older and archive material, a significant amount has gone to digital
preservation of everything from mediaeval manuscripts to documentary film. It is an express condition of
grants that the resources must be made publicly available.
The converse of this is that substantial quantities of "raw" satellite data are purchased and stored at one of
the data centres, while very large government datasets such as the Census are held at another. This both
provides a rich resource for the community at large and again concentrates expertise in specialised centres.
There is a common and justified perception that there is too much useless, irrelevant and misleading
information on the Internet. Several resource discovery projects have been set up covering faculty level
areas such as engineering and medicine. These will identify and catalogue relevant internet resources as
well as ensuring their quality and availability. Although individual universities can (and no doubt will)
develop their own resource discovery services, these are sufficiently ill understood that it has been felt that
a national initiative will best explore and develop standards and allow the UK to take part in international
developments. It has been felt that a central push will provide larger benefits than fragmented individual
efforts.
Perhaps the most important element of the programme lies in training for cultural change. Large sums have
been allocated for the development of training programmes which will develop the professional skills of
library and information workers.
The most recent material provided is a large range of electronic journals from three publishers – Academic
Press, Blackwell Scientific and the Institute of Physics Press. Although each deal is a little different, not
least to allow different models to be tested, they are intended to provide the complete list of each publisher
in electronic form. Discussions were difficult and protracted and the publishers much less able than they
had thought to provide the journals electronically. Individual universities have also learned valuable
lessons about the cost of supporting electronic journals as a mass service. These range from training needs
to the provision of the correct browsers and software on every computer in the university. The general
lesson learned is that purchase costs is the least important issue and support the most important.
This large explanation is intended to convey several points of which the major one is the coherence and
extent of the programme of content provision. Much effort is expended in looking at how to deal with and
make deals with large scientific publishers. We have felt this to be important but misguided. Companies
such as Elsevier or Springer are the exception. Small learned societies are the norm for scholarly
communication, while much non-commercial and out of copyright material is of value in research. It has
seemed important to ensure a rich and varied set of content rather than simply strike a set of commercial
deals. In addition this has allowed sensible exploration of infrastructure issues from interface design to
network traffic management.
We have also been clear that information should be available in all disciplines and at all levels. We are
committed to creating information literate graduates and they require access to the resources they will use
when they move into employment. A skilled workforce is crucial to the future of the country. Likewise we
believe that the digital library is important in all disciplines and we must guard against allowing the STM
publishing model to drive all debate. Theologians are as important to the universities as chemists.
We have been eager to create a critical mass of content, discipline by discipline. Much digital library
experimentation has been to prove concepts. There is general agreement that the real test then comes in
scaling up experiments to operational services and in making those services essential scholarly tools rather
than experimental toys.
Finally we have felt it important to demonstrate value for money. A large evaluation programme has been
commissioned. Ultimately we are expending taxpayers money and we wish this not only to be done, but to
be seen to be done, effectively, economically and efficiently.
The critical area is undoubtedly support. Publishers have worked in a climate where support was barely
needed beyond the odd replacement copy of a book. But the complex nexus of data, telecommunications
and software requires extensive support which may be summed up in the maxim, "User-friendly systems
are not".
The other critical lesson is that of partnership. Many libraries have tried to build their own digital
equivalent. We believe that there are lessons to be learnt and shared together rather than alone. Similarly
co-operating libraries cannot alone afford to create and/or provide all the digital content which will be
required in future. We need partnerships with publishers and learned societies. We have lessons, technical
skills and experience to offer them as they move into the cold harsh economics of the digital world.
Director of Information Services & Systems, King’s College London
The Organisation and Funding of Higher Education
In a very short space it is difficult to do more than sketch in the background to the UK
experience in acquiring content for the digital library. A national initiative has been launched
and, in order to understand it, one must sketch in a little of the background of higher education.
What is provided?
The longest standing deals are for the discounted purchase of software, these being negotiated by CHEST
(Combined Higher Education Software Team). In addition to discounting commercial software through
national deals, the community has also used this route to commission software where commercial products
did not exist.
Goals
A cardinal goal of policy is that information should be free at the point of use. While institutions have been
asked to contribute to the running costs we believe strongly that individual staff and students should not
have to meet a personal charge for information. That said we are also clear that there is a real need to
create a sustainable economic model for the digital library.
Methods and Lessons
Although there was a general consensus that higher education should embark on a digital library initiative,
there was also a clear understanding of the old proverb that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. It
was felt that a small group of committed professionals should be given the budget and the authority to act
as they saw fit, even if this appeared autocratic. While there was a clear desire to involve as many
institutions as possible in research and development, it was clearly understood that this would be to
centrally determined goals. At the same time and as a counterbalance a programme of rigorous evaluation
was approved which would show how wisely the money had been allocated.
Conclusion
The UK now has a wide range of electronic services available nationally. Perhaps more importantly it has
achieved a number of expected and unexpected outcomes. There is a cadre of professionals experienced in
developing electronic services. The UK has been able to drive some of the debate with publishers on how
electronic services will be provided and charged for. The UK has had early and valuable involvement in
such standards work as that conducted by the Dublin Core Group. University staff and students have
become heavy daily users of electronic libraries. A large corpus of material has been created or purchased
and we have moved a considerable way towards the dream of creating the Distributed National Electronic
Collection.