8
Reflections on Libraries: 1990-2012[1]
Richard E. Quandt
I am very pleased to be here and to have been asked to give a talk on this important occasion. I was fortunate enough to become involved with libraries in Central/Eastern Europe, just as the region was beginning to emerge from many years of Soviet domination and influence, and the defects of the Soviet system affected all aspects of society, including of course universities and libraries. While librarians had made heroic efforts to stay abreast of developments in the West, the libraries themselves had only minimal access to the hardware and software that was available in Western Europe and North America: they often had to try and develop their own software and run it on Soviet clones of western equipment. The reasons for the isolation were partly ideological and partly financial; in 1990, the ideological reasons vanished, but the financial ones remained for many years.
Stocks of Books and Journals and Prices. As a very tentative generalization, I would claim that the past 22 years of library developments fall, very roughly, into four concerns and, corresponding to these, into four overlapping periods. The first of these was the desire to replenish the stock of books and journals that the libraries could not freely acquire during the Soviet period. Of course, during this period the cost of all library materials, but particularly the cost of serials, has increased beyond all reasonable proportions. From 1970 to 1990, the cost of periodicals in science and technology increased roughly eleven-fold, in the social sciences eight-fold and in the arts and humanities by almost five-fold; a period in which the general price level as measured by the GNP deflator only trebled.[2] The increase in prices has been relentless in recent years as well, as can be seen from Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 shows the increase in prices, by field of scholarship in three recent years and Table 2 gives the average prices by country of origin.
TABLE 1 COST HISTORY BY BROAD SUBJECT[3]
/ Average No. of Titles 2003–2007 / Average Cost Per Title 2003 / Average Cost Per Title 2004 / % of Change ’03–’04 / Average Cost Per Title 2005 / % of Change ’04–’05 / Average Cost Per Title 2006 / % of Change ’05–’06 / Average Cost Per Title 2007 / % of Change ’06–’07 / % of Change ’03–’07 /ARTS AND HUMANITIES CITATION INDEX
U.S. / 402 / $93 / $101 / 8.6- / $107 / 5.9 / $113 / 5.6 / $121 / 7.1 / 30.1
NON–U.S. / 560 / 157 / 182 / 15.9 / 195 / 7.1 / 201 / 3.1 / 219 / 9.0 / 39.5
SOCIAL SCIENCES CITATION INDEX
U.S. / 876 / 298 / 327 / 9.7 / 355 / 8.6 / 385 / 8.5 / 423 / 9.9 / 41.9
NON–U.S. / 754 / 565 / 630 / 11.5 / 684 / 8.6 / 732 / 7.0 / 785 / 7.2 / 38.9
SCIENCE CITATION INDEX
U.S. / 1,265 / 868 / 936 / 7.8 / 1,005 / 7.4 / 1,101 / 9.6 / 1,193 / 8.4 / 37.4
NON–U.S. / 2,034 / 1,477 / 1,606 / 8.7 / 1,708 / 6.% / 1,820 / 6.6 / 1,948 / 7.0 / 31.9
The change from 2003 to 2007 is roughly between 30 and 42% from the Orsdel-Born data; another source puts the change from 1996 to 1999 at 52% and from 1999 to 2002 at 32%.[4] The average price per ISI title ranged in 2007 from a high of $3,362 in the Netherlands to a low of $209 in India. The most horrendous example is a journal in Chemistry, Tetrahedron, which has an annual subscription price of $39,082.[5] There was some hope that libraries could save money by dealing with aggregators such as Proquest and Ebscohost who would supply aggregates of electronic journals. There are well-known advantages as well as disadvantages to dealing with aggregators; but the main point is that the increase in prices has created major problem even for libraries in rich western countries and have encouraged reliance on digital publications. The price increases threaten the degree to which libraries can serve their customers, and because of the tendency to shift library budgets to journals, away from monographs, they threaten the survival of university presses.
TABLE 2 AVERAGE PRICE PER TITLE BY COUNTRY 2007[6]
Country / No. of ISI Titles / Avg. Price Per Title /Netherlands / 377 / $3,362
Russia / 57 / 2,907
Ireland / 38 / 2,630
Austria / 25 / 1,830
England / 1485 / 1,357
Switzerland / 91 / 1,355
Singapore / 32 / 1,209
New Zealand / 24 / 1,081
Germany / 251 / 1,072
China / 16 / 849
United States / 2292 / 763
Australia / 39 / $434
Spain / 14 / 413
France / 108 / 406
Japan / 74 / 364
Israel / 12 / 322
Czech Republic / 15 / 318
Italy / 50 / 274
Norway / 11 / 271
Canada / 108 / 261
Scotland / 12 / 245
India / 12 / 209
AVERAGE COST OF AN ISI TITLE: $1,145
Many western organizations attempted to remedy the lack of book and journal literature in East/Central European libraries by substantial donation programs. While some of these helped, many were as good as useless. Among the most useful, targeted donation programs were the American Czech and Slovak Education Foundation, the Sabre Foundation and Journal Donation Project of the New School University. But on the other side of the ledger, the librarian of the American Studies Library at Warsaw University reported that after a visit to Indiana University in 1993 or 1994, the kindly librarians there shipped her 76 boxes of books that the Indiana Library was going to discard. When the books arrived, she found that on average only one volume per box was useful for the American Studies Library. The well-meaning gift was largely wasted.
Automation. The second phase of library activities involved large-scale automation. The discovery that automated library records could be used over and over in a variety of contexts revolutionized the approach to librarianship, and the apex of automated libraries was viewed as the OPAC, which in turn revolutionized the way in which patrons were approaching the search for books. The automation of the libraries employed a staggering variety of software. Almost from the beginning, CDS/ISIS was present, as were certain home-grown packages, such as MAK (in Poland), IKIS (in Slovakia), MAKS(in the Czech Republic), ALICE (in Latvia) and Erudite and Urica in South Africa. These were soon joined by TINLIB, LIBER, VTLS, Dynix-Horizon, which subsequently became Sirsi-Dynix, Aleph, Bibis, Voyager, Oracle and probably a few others. All the home-grown products “worked” in a manner of speaking, but were not really suitable for the more ambitious tasks which we had in mind, which was to work in groups of libraries united in a consortium with databases that would eventually grow to enormous size and be able to handle all aspects of library work: cataloguing, authority files, serials, circulation, interlibrary loans, etc. It was initially difficult to persuade people to purchases library software products off the shelf rather than develop their own. One outstanding and admirable rector of a major university said to me in the very early 1990s that he would solve the library automation problem by taking the ten best programmers of the university and lock them in a room and not let them out until they have completed a library automation software package. In 1992, the Polish National Library was also thinking of developing its own software. The Latvian library consortium insisted for the longest time that it would rely on ALICE, a piece Latvian library software, and it took a great deal of effort to convince them that using Aleph was a better idea; as a result, 11 scientific libraries currently use Aleph, but some 702 other libraries use ALISE.[7] As recently as the year 2000, a deputy minister of Culture in Estonia, Margus Allikmaa, was annoyed with me for letting the Estonian consortium, ELNET, purchase III’s expensive Innopac, on the grounds that Estonian programmers had successfully developed a theater reservation system and would therefore also be able to develop library software. Ultimately we prevailed, and modern and powerful automation system were acquired everywhere, but the road was strewn with many obstacles and traps.
One of these traps, of course, which slowed everything down, was the rudimentary state of many of the wide area networks and the primitive state of computing equipment. Universities installed LANs, which enabled efficient communication within each university; but intercity communications developed more slowly. As late as 1993, the Czech electronic network, CESNET, operated at 64 kbits/sec, in 1995 the Latvian and Estonian backbones operated at the same speed, and in 1995 only 22 Baltic libraries had Internet connections of any kind. Equipment was primitive by today’s standards: as late as 1995, Lithuanian libraries had mostly 286-chip and 386-chip machines and in 1994 the larger of two servers in Kraków had only 16 Gbytes of disk storage, while the Wrocław server had 6 Gbytes of disk space. But it should be said that librarians and scholars tried to make the best of a bad situation. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and I recall a case in which actual research in physiology was done in Košice in 1991 on an ancient Commodore computer with 64 Kbytes of RAM. Fortunately, as time passed, the hardware and the connections improved substantially, and today, automated systems are in place with huge databases.
That is not to say that everything worked seamlessly from the very beginning. There were lots of complaints about automation systems in the early years, and as I remember, there were mostly six sets of problems or complaints: (1) That the diacritical characters were not working right, or even more significantly, that one of the languages important for a library was not available; this was particularly important in the Baltic countries because a very large proportion of their holdings were books in Russian. (2) That different versions of the software had been installed in different locations, making collaboration among libraries difficult. (3) That the libraries got inadequate attentions from vendors. (4) That particular isolated problems turned up with the software and they took too long to fix. (5) That library salaries were not competitive with the commercial sector in the economy, as a result of which some serious “brain-drain” occurred: it was reported here and there that the salary ratio between the commercial sector and libraries was 10:1. (6) And finally, that the training that librarians received in the early period was inadequate. Concerning this latter point, I want to remember our late friend and colleague, Anna Paluszkiewicz, who made great efforts to teach librarians at universities other than her own.
An interesting further point concerning automation is this: relatively few of the libraries that I know of in Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and South Africa did not stick with the software that they acquired initially. Exceptions are Slovakia, which in 2004 switched from the originally acquired Ex Libris Aleph to VTLS’ Virtua, and Hungary, which is gradually switching to two domestic products: Corvina (based on Voyager) and HUNTÉKA. We can conclude that whatever shortcomings this or that software system may have had, it rarely outweighed the cost of switching.
Automation typically, but not always, took place within the framework of a consortium of libraries, based at least in part on geographical proximity. I felt at the time that the economies of working consortially outweighed the costs of coordination: there were economies of scale in both software and hardware, and most certainly in learning to cope with a new system. Ewa Dobrzyńska-Lankosz noted that libraries could pool their resources “in order to oversee problems encountered with the implementation of computer systems.”[8] In particular, consortia encouraged standardization, and in particular, the adoption of international standards that made communication and record exchange with libraries in other systems work seamlessly.[9] While I continue to believe that consortia are enormously useful, recently some doubt has been cast on their usefulness in South Africa, where the justification for maintaining their separate existence seems to have diminished, perhaps as a result of the shared cataloguing they all participate in; the consortia in South Africa (of which there were five major ones) have mostly disbanded in the sense that they no longer have consortial activities; nevertheless, the libraries are healthy and all participate in the union catalogue. The increasing irrelevance of consortia, as such, in South Africa is underscored by the fact that the most recent paper dealing with consortia in that country is dated 2005.[10]
Union Catalogues. It seems fairly clear that the past ten years have witnessed an explosive development of the theory and practice of union catalogues. All countries and all libraries basically discovered that the discipline of contributing to and downloading from a union catalogue enables shared cataloguing and the reuse of library records created by one library by many others, thus saving time and money, creating standards and imposing uniformity. I shall be fairly brief here but have to acknowledge the enormous debt that I owe to the papers of Janifer Gatenby of OCLC.[11]
There is no single model that fits the development of union catalogues. The latecomers to library automation (1995 and thereafter: Estonia, Latvia, South Africa) seem to have started on their union catalogues almost as soon as they started with automation. The libraries that started automation earlier were perhaps more gradual in their approach, as each library realized that it had to get its own house in order first. But a tremendous amount has been accomplished in the past ten years. The number of bibliographic records in union catalogues is shown in Table 3: