Shirley Baker

Vice Chancellor for Scholarly Resources and Dean of Libraries

Issues in Transborder Resource Sharing

The Elephant and the Mouse

The United States, I assume, is the elephant, and I am the elephant's mouthpiece. I've played some funny roles in my life, but this is a new one. It has caused me to reflect on the US and how it customarily looks at the rest of the world. The answer is, of course, "Not much". The size and the economic and political power of the United States make it a parochial, insular country. For most of America, the border is a long way off, and although one may drive a Japanese car, wear clothes made in China, drink French wines, and eat cherries from Chile, we don't really think of ourselves as interdependent with the rest of the world.

And, for international resource sharing, mostly we don't. At least, not yet. Canada does seven percent of its borrowing from outside its borders, and ten percent of its lending is international. The United States borrows about one percent internationally, and lends about the same amount. But this cannot continue. If this is really an increasingly international, border-less, interdependent world, we must find ways to share resources internationally quickly, reliably and cheaply.

Every year self-sufficiency becomes more an illusion than reality. Every year, American libraries buy a smaller percentage of the materials produced in other countries. And, every year our world and our curricula become more international. With budget pressures unrelenting and the volume and cost of publication continuing to grow, attempts to reverse the declining acquisitions trends in foreign acquisitions are hopeless. Thus, our only choice is to increase the volume, ease, and speed of international resource sharing. The obstacles are great. The current international library world is chaotic. It is very difficult to know what exists, to find where it is held, and to get one's hands on it.

Let us take a moment and reflect on what an ideal world, one where we've overcome all our obstacles, would be. The library of the future will be a single, virtual, universal collection, built and maintained by librarians. Any item would be identifiable from anywhere, and there would be convenient mechanisms for getting physical or intellectual access to contents. Specialists (i.e., librarians), who had helped collect and describe the items in the world library, would assist end-users in locating and negotiating for access to materials (or create systems to do that).

Where are we now and how much progress have we made toward such a world? Let me talk a bit about the past few decades. Resource sharing has been of interest to me since I supervised an interlibrary loan unit at Johns Hopkins University in the 1970's. In those days interlibrary loan in a research library was an essentially invisible operation. OCLC and RLG had just developed their interlibrary loan subsystems as a replacement for paper forms and TWX. (In Canada, technology was being exploited to improve interlibrary loan, but in slightly different ways.) In the 1970's the interlibrary loan staff usually worked in a closet, were visited only by a handful of scholars, and were better known to interlibrary loan staff at other institutions than to their own local library colleagues. Interlibrary loan, even within the country, was certainly not considered very important for the parent library.

Research libraries have historically defined resource sharing as a collections issue - making agreements about who collects what, especially for 'esoteric' areas - to guarantee that copies of critical scholarly materials are made available somewhere. Providing timely access to these scholarly materials was not as high a priority, and, indeed, was not achievable in the pre-electronic world. I believe that timely access is now achievable, and our challenge is to Make it so!, as Captain Picard of Star Trek - The Next Generation would say.

Collections need description, i.e., bibliographic control. In librarianship, discussions in cataloging and classification dominated the 19th and early 20th centuries; remember Panini, Cutter, Dewey, Ranganathan, and Lubetsky. But, the real breakthrough in bibliographic control came with the application of electronic technology. The use of computers, the development of the MARC format for cataloging, and the appearance of electronic indexes and abstracts transformed bibliographic control. Suddenly, it was possible to describe our collections in ways that could be dynamic, where records could be changed or enhanced, without an electric eraser.

Advances in electronic bibliographic control not only made our collections visible to our users; they made other libraries' collections visible also, making access the next challenge. Previously, only the sophisticated researcher knew to search the National Union Catalog and the Union List of Serials. Now everyone and his cousin are stumbling across electronic indexes and electronic union catalogs, and discovering items they want to read. The interlibrary loan subsystems developed by the bibliographic utilities, while apparently developed as an afterthought, did emerge to serve resource sharing needs, as did electronic arrangements in Canada.

Where Are We Now? We have entered into a new period of resource sharing. Governing agencies have become intensely interested in fostering cooperation and resource sharing. One always has the suspicion that their motives are to reduce our budgets, but many librarians have been successful in convincing their governing agencies that resource sharing will dramatically enhance rather than simply replace our library and information services.

Resource sharing is moving forward on several fronts. There is a confusing array of developments: traditional interlibrary loan based on virtual union catalogs; patron-initiated, unmediated interlibrary loan, and reciprocal borrowing based on real or virtual union catalogs.

Many of our colleagues argue that unmediated interlibrary loan and direct patron borrowing make interlibrary loan irrelevant. They argue that efforts to improve interlibrary loan are short-sighted, even retrograde. I would argue that growth of patron-initiated and direct patron borrowing is exciting and life-saving for librarians (and a noble step toward the virtual, universal library). It may help us handle the rise in demand for domestic resource sharing, so that we can focus more of our traditional interlibrary loan resources on meeting international demand.

Won't Electronic Publishing Make This Discussion Irrelevant? Anyone who has been a librarian for more than a short time has been asked repeatedly, "Won't (fill in the latest technology) eliminate the need for libraries?" This question was probably asked when Gutenberg introduced moveable type. Since books could be printed in large numbers and bought by anyone, why not maintain libraries only for manuscripts, as warehouses of dead information? My answer to this recurring question is, "Nothing goes away in libraries. Everything is an add-on." Books did not replace manuscripts or papyrus or clay tablets. Microforms and videos sit on our shelves beside books. Even if we wish it to happen, electronic publishing will not, in our lifetimes, completely replace all the other forms we keep and will not eliminate scholars' desires to use earlier forms of information.

For the purposes of this discussion of resource sharing, I assume the following. The amount of information available electronically will increase, at a rate impossible to predict. Indeed, the Mellon-funded JSTOR project seems to indicate that it may even be economic to replace some of our older materials with electronic versions. Pervasive electronic publishing will transform traditional publishing practices in ways impossible to predict. But, the availability of electronic information will not materially alter the key issues in resource sharing.

Developments and Challenges for Interlibrary Loan Those who still believe interlibrary loan to be a necessary service have been working to improve it. Interlibrary loan as practiced in the beginning of this decade compared badly with other units in our libraries, particularly our cataloging departments which had made dramatic improvements in work flow and productivity over the previous years. Compared to the post-industrial electronic service that cataloging has become, interlibrary loan looks like a pre-industrial cottage industry. The last major technological improvement in interlibrary loan in the United States was the introduction of ILL subsystems by the major bibliographic utilities in the 1970's. Modest enhancements had been made in those subsystems over the years, but on-going inadequacies led to the development of enhancement software packages by disgruntled ILL staff.

Experience with the demands and frustrations of ILL led me to conclude that the time was ripe for library directors to be as engaged in ILL. An involvement comparable to directors' previous intense interest in technical services technology and workflow issues was required. You will remember the 1970's and early 80's, when library directors were obsessed with the online catalog, authority control, and AACRII!

In the early 1990's, Mary Jackson and I were successful in outlining resource sharing issues for research libraries in a white paper which led to an Association of Research Libraries' initiative to re-conceptualize interlibrary loan. Within a short period of time, ARL's North American Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery (NAILDD) project emerged, with three major goals. Those goals were to improve interlibrary loan through the development of financial software to handle billing, the development of management software to provide decision support information, and the implementation of standards to allow communication among electronic systems without re-keying of data.

The NAILDD project quickly engendered a Developers/Implementers Group (the DIG), where software vendors could come together to discuss libraries needs and technological solutions. An early result was OCLC's implementation of their Interlibrary Fee Management (IFM) software, which allows charging among libraries without individual bills being issued. This software had the pleasant effect of facilitating international interlibrary loan. Librarians from Australia, from Hong Kong, and other countries have praised the convenience of being able to borrow from OCLC institutions and pay charges without cutting checks in foreign currency.

The most recent progress has been in the implementation of the international interlibrary loan protocols, ISO 10160 and 10161. In 1995 NAILDD's Developers/Implementers Group accepted National Library of Canada's challenge to implement the international standard. A small group of vendors members interested in implementation assembled at the Coalition for Networked Information meeting in Portland in November 1995and another group, the International Protocol Implementers Group, with the euphonious acronym IPIG, was formed. Progress is occurring faster than expected, with participation by vendors large and small and significant international interest. There are now British and Australian members of the IPIG and interest from Scandinavia, Central Europe, and Asia.

Full implementation of the standard protocol will mean that requests can be moved from one local system or bibliographic utility to another, without re-keying, until the request is filled. This will significantly reduce staff time, the largest cost component in interlibrary loan or document delivery. Indeed, a 1993 ARL/RLG interlibrary loan cost study showed $30 as the cost of an ILL transaction ($19 for the borrowing institution and $11 for the lender). Three-quarters of this is staff cost. If the staff time involved in an interlibrary loan can be reduced, costs will drop accordingly. Mary and I believe that productivity improvements of 100% are within reach, if we have the will and imagination to design them.

The 1993 cost study has just been reproduced in a Mellon-funded survey, which also attempts to measure performance - turn-around time, fill rate, and user satisfaction. From the recent survey, we hope to see the effects of changes made by libraries which have participated in both. We also hope to identify best practices and disseminate them widely, so that libraries wanting to make improvements will have models of the most cost effective and user-satisfying operations.

What Next? The next challenge is to achieve significant international resource sharing. International. is the watchword for tomorrow. While many of us Americans continue to think and act parochially, we must put that behind us. Business interests are global, education is increasingly international. With library budgets in a losing battle with increased publication prices and volume, what library will own the full range of international materials to meet local demand? None that I can envision.

Let me emphasize: While there are some valiant attempts to bring a larger proportion of international materials into our libraries, there is a continuing and growing need to engage in international resource sharing, to go from our one percent to a number that more reflects our users' needs. To make this viable, several things must happen.

For starters, we must set a good example by increasing our willingness to lend outside our borders, building the sound practices that will alleviate the real or feared problems. This may be the hardest thing to change. We've discovered in our work with the North American Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Project that changing staff attitudes is much harder than engendering software improvements. However, we must start work on changing attitudes, both with data about real risks and by encouraging calculated risks.

Equally important, we must encourage the availability of bibliographic information from all quarters of the globe. OCLC and RLG are engaged in an exciting competition to see which can bring the largest number of international libraries into its database. And, of course, we must complete the conversion into machine readable form of records for all of our holdings - microforms, government publications, manuscripts - of all of our libraries - large and small, American and Canadian, so that we are ready to exchange those things which are less well known and perhaps unique to our libraries.

We must improve delivery options to include those as reliable and safe as UPS or FedEx, so that we can 'mail' our resources, sure that they will get there, and get back. We must support the enhancement of electronic delivery mechanisms so that non-returnables can go directly to the end-user, at light speed. We must support the enhancement of our country's electronic infrastructure, so that it can handle our traffic at something that approximates light speed rather than (as happens occasionally) at rush hour gridlock pace.

We must the development of standard software to link libraries electronically across borders. Any effort here will pay off handsomely. Thus, the work on the ISO standards becomes increasingly important and worthwhile, and Canadians deserve credit for their unrelenting support of those standards, in the face of years of United States' indifference. And, we must pursue the appropriate application of other standards - Z39.50 comes to mind - which enhance our abilities to communicate electronically.

Finally, we must work every day to change attitudes, to nurture those who think regionally, nationally, and internationally. We must reward those who can recognize when professions of national autonomy are really excuses for parochialism. The world is very different from what it was, even a short time ago. Now, everyone is having to work more collaboratively. We librarians are often the first to make collaboration work. Let's keep on doing that.

Shirley K. Baker
Vice Chancellor for Scholarly Resources
and Dean of Libraries
E-mail: shirley.baker@wustl.edu
Washington University
Campus Box 1061
St. Louis, MO 63130
Phone: 314-935-5400
Fax: 314-935-4045